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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/europefaith01bell 



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EUROPE 

AND THE 
FAITH 



SECOND rMPRESSION 



EUROPE 

AND THE 
FAITH BY 
H. BELLOC 



CONSTABLE AND 
COMPANY LIMITED 
LONDON 1921 



90 JEspfcaos ift$p w%£ 






APR2S 




TO MY COLLEAGUES OF THE 
ST. THOMAS'S HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

" Sine audoritate nulla vita " 



CONTENTS 



fNTRODUOTION THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF His 

TORY . . . . ... 



[. What was the Roman Empire? . 
II. What was the Church in the Roman Empire? 

III. What was the "Fall" op the Roman Empire? 

IV. The Beginnings op the Nations 
V. What happened in Britain ? 

VI. The Dark Ages . 
VII. The Middle Ages 
VIII. "What was the Reformation 1 

IX. The Defection of Britain . 
X. Conclusion .... 



1 

29 
53 
91 
125 
161 
221 
245 
265 
287 
315 



INTRODUCTION 

THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 



THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 

I say the Catholic " conscience" of History — I say 
" conscience " — that is, an intimate knowledge 
through identity : the intuition of a thing which 
is one with the Knower — I do not say " The 
Catholic Aspect of History." This talk of "aspects" 
is modern and therefore part of a decline : it is 
false, and therefore ephemeral : I will not stoop to 
it. I will rather do homage to truth and say that 
there is no such thing as a Catholic " aspect " of 
European history. There is a Protestant aspect, 
a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese 
aspect, and so forth. For all of these look on 
Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe 
from within. There is no more a Catholic "aspect" 
of European history than there is a man's "aspect" 
of himself. 

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is 
even a man's " aspect " of himself. In nothing 
does false philosophy prove itself more false. For 



4 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

a man's way of perceiving himself (when he does 
so honestly and after a cleansing examination of 
his mind) is in line with his Creator's, and therefore 
with reality : he sees from within. 

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has 
in him conscience, which is the voice of God. 
Not only does he know by this that the outer 
world is real, but also that his own personality 
is real. 

When a man, although flattered by the voice of 
another, yet says within himself "I am a mean 
fellow," he has hold of reality. When a man, 
though maligned of the world, says to himself of 
himself "My purpose was just," he has hold of 
reality. He knows himself, for he is himself. A man 
does not know an infinite amount about himself. 
But the finite amount he does know is all in the 
map ; it is all part of what is really there. What 
he does not know about himself would, did he 
know it, fit in with what he does know about 
himself. There are indeed " aspects " of a man for 
all others except these two, himself and God Who 
made him. These two, when they regard him, see 
him as he is : all other minds have their several 
views of him ; and these indeed are " aspects," 
each of which is false, while all differ. But a 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 5 

man's view of himself is not an " aspect " : it is a 
comprehension. 

Now then ; so it is with us who are of the 
Faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic 
as he reads that story does not grope at it from 
without, he understands it from within. He cannot 
understand it altogether, because he is a finite 
being ; but he is also that which he has to under- 
stand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the 
Faith. 

The Catholic brings to history (when I say 
" history " in these pages I mean the history of 
Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the 
confessional accuses himself of what he knows to 
be true and what other people cannot judge, so a 
Catholic, talking of the united European civilisation, 
when he blames it, blames it for motives and for 
acts which are his own. He himself could have 
done those things in person. He is not relatively 
right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a 
man can testify to his own motive, so can the 
Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant 
conceptions of the European story ; for he knows 
why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, 
look upon the story of Europe externally, as 
strangers. They have to deal with something 



6 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

which presents itself to them partially and dis- 
connectedly, by its phenomena alone : he sees it 
all from its centre, in its essence, and together. 

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is 
Europe : and Europe is The Church. 

The Catholic conscience of history is not a 
conscience which begins with the development of 
the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean. It 
goes back much further than that. The Catholic 
understands the soil in which that plant of the 
Faith arose. In a way that no other man can, he 
understands the Roman military effort ; why that 
effort clashed with the gross Asiatic and merchant 
empire of Carthage ; what we derived from the 
light of Athens ; what food we found in the Irish 
and the British, the Gallic tribes, their dim but 
awful memories of immortality ; what cousinship 
we claim with the ritual of false but profound 
religions, and even how ancient Israel (the little 
violent people, before they got poisoned, while 
they were yet National in the mountains of Judaea) 
were, in the old dispensation at least, central and 
(as we Catholics say) sacred : devoted to a peculiar 
Mission. 

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls 
into its proper order. The picture is normal. 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 7 

Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of 
our great story is easy, natural, and full. It is 
also final. 

But the modern Catholic, especially if he is 
confined to the use of the English tongue, suffers 
from a deplorable and (it is to be hoped) a passing 
accident. No modern book in the English tongue 
gives him a conspectus of the past ; he is compelled 
to study violently hostile authorities, North German 
(or English copying North German), whose know- 
ledge is never that of the true and balanced 
European. 

He comes perpetually across phrases which he 
sees at once to be absurd, either in their limitations 
or in the contradictions they connote. But unless 
he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot 
put his finger upon the precise mark of the 
absurdity. In the books he reads — if they are in 
the English language at least — he finds things 
lacking which his instinct for Europe tells him 
should be there ; but he cannot supply their place 
because the man who wrote those books was 
himself ignorant of such things, or rather could 
not conceive them. 

I will take two examples to show what I mean. 
The one is the present battlefield of Europe : a 



8 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

large affair not yet cleared, concerning all nations, 
and concerning them apparently upon matters 
quite indifferent to the Faith. It is a thing which 
any stranger might analyse (one would think), and 
which yet no historian explains. 

The second I deliberately choose as an example 
particular and narrow : an especially doctrinal 
story. I mean the Story of St. Thomas of Canter- 
bury, of which the modern historian makes nothing 
but an incomprehensible contradiction ; but which 
is to a Catholic a sharp revelation of the half-way 
house between the Empire and modern nationalities. 

As to the first of these two examples : — Here 
is at last the Great War in Europe : clearly an 
issue — things come to a head. How came it ? 
Why these two camps ? What was this curious 
grouping of the West holding out in desperate 
Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a 
victory apparently inevitable after the breakdown 
of the Orthodox Russian shell ? Where lay the 
roots of so singular a contempt for our old order, 
chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed ? 
Who shall explain the hesitation of the Pope, the 
anomaly of Ireland, the aloofness of old Spain ? 

It is all a welter if we try to order it by 
modern, external — especially by any materialist 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 9 

or even sceptical — analysis. It was not climate 
against climate — that facile materialist contrast of 
" environment " which is the crudest and stupidest 
explanation of human affairs. It was not race — 
if indeed any races can still be distinguished in 
European blood save broad and confused appear- 
ances, such as Easterner and Westerner, short and 
tall, dark and fair. It was not — as another foolish 
academic theory (popular some years ago) would 
pretend — an economic affair. There was here no 
revolt of rich against poor, no pressure of un- 
developed barbarians against developed lands, no 
plan of exploitation, nor of men organised attempt- 
ing to seize the soil of less fruitful owners. 

How came these two opponents into being, the 
potential antagonism of which was so strong that 
millions willingly suffered their utmost for the sake 
of a decision ? 

That man who would explain the tremendous 
judgement on the superficial test of religious differ- 
ences among modern " sects " must be bewildered 
indeed ! I have seen the attempt made in more 
than one journal and book, enemy and Allied. 
The results are lamentable ! 

Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was Atheist. 
But her subject provinces supported her exultantly, 



10 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely 
Catholic Bavaria. Her main support — without 
which she could not have challenged Europe- 
was that very power whose sole reason for being 
was Catholicism : the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine 
which, from Vienna, controlled and consolidated 
the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav : the House 
of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic 
organisation in Eastern Europe. 

The Catholic Irish largely stood apart. 

Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not 
Catholic because those things are foreign, was 
more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the 
unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was 
notoriously divided within herself over the religious 
principle of that unity. No modern religious 
analysis such as men draw up who think of 
religion as opinion will make anything of all this. 
Then why was there a fight ? People who talk 
of "Democracy" as the issue of the Great War 
may be neglected : Democracy — one noble, ideal, 
but rare and perilous form of human government 
— was not at stake. 

No historian can talk thus. The essentially 
aristocratic policy of England now turned to a 
plutocracy, the despotism of Russia and Prussia, 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 11 

the immense complex of all other great modern 
States gives such nonsense the lie. 

People who talk of " A struggle for supremacy 
between the two Teutonic champions, Germany 
and England," are less respectable still. England 
is not Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The 
English Cabinet decided by but the smallest 
possible majority (a majority of one) to enter the 
war. The Prussian Government never dreamt it 
would have to meet England at all. There is no 
question of so single an issue. The world was at 
war. Why ? No man is an historian who cannot 
answer from the past. All who can answer from 
the past, and are historians, see that it is the 
historical depth of the European faith, not its 
present surface, which explains all. 

The struggle was against Prussia. 

Why did Prussia arise ? Because the imperfect 
Byzantine evangelisation of the Eastern Slavonic 
Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia, the 
western flood of living tradition welling up from 
Rome. Prussia was an hiatus. In that small 
neglected area, neither half cultivated from the 
Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West, 
rose a strong garden of weeds. And weeds sow 
themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds, 



12 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

could not extend until the West weakened through 
schism. It had to wait till the battle of the 
Reformation died down. But it waited. And at 
last, when there was opportunity, it grew pro- 
digiously. The weed patch overran first Poland 
and the Germanies, then half Europe. When it 
challenged civilisation at last it was master of a 
hundred and fifty million souls. 

What are the tests of this war ? In their vastly 
different fashions they are Poland and Ireland — 
the extreme islands of tenacious tradition : the 
conservators of the Past through a national passion 
for the Faith. 

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy 
New Thing which desired to live its own distorted 
life anew and separate from Europe, and the old 
Christian rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, 
in the morals spread upon it by Prussia, the effect 
of that great storm wherein three hundred years 
ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into 
two. This war was the largest, yet no more than 
the recurrent, example of that unceasing wrestle : 
the outer, the unstable, the untraditional — which 
is barbarism — pressing blindly upon the inner, the 
traditional, the strong — which is Ourselves : which 
is Christendom : which is Europe. 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 13 

Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster 
hesitated ! 

We used to say during the war that if Prussia 
conquered civilisation failed, but that if the Allies 
conquered civilisation was re-established. What 
did we mean ? We meant, not that the New 
Barbarians could not handle a machine : they can. 
But we meant that they had learnt all from us. 
We meant that they cannot continue of them- 
selves ; and that we can. We meant that they 
have no roots. 

When we say that Vienna was the tool of 
Berlin, that Madrid should be ashamed, what do 
we mean ? It has no meaning save that Civilisa- 
tion is one and we its family. That which 
challenged us, though it controlled so much which 
should have aided us and was really our own, was 
external to civilisation, and did not lose that 
character by the momentary use of civilised Allies 

When we said that "the Slav" failed us, what 
did we mean ? It was not a statement of Race. 
Poland is Slav, so is Serbia : they were two vastly 
differing States, and yet both with us. It meant 
that the Byzantine influence was never sufficient 
to inform a true European State or to give Russia 
a national discipline ; because the Byzantine 



14 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Empire, the tutor of Russia, was cut off from 
us, the Europeans, the Catholics, the heirs, who 
are the conservators of the world. 

The Catholic Conscience of Europe grasped this 
war — with apologies where it was in the train of 
Prussia, with affirmation where it was free. It saw 
what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided 
upon the future : the two alternative futures which 
lie before the world. 

All other judgements of the war made nonsense. 
You had, on the allied side, the most vulgar pro- 
fessional politicians and their rich paymasters 
shouting for " Democracy " ; pedants mumbling 
about "Race." On the side of Prussia (the nega- 
tion of nationality) you have the use of some vague 
national mission of conquest divinely given to the 
very various Germans and the least competent to 
govern. You would come at last j[if you listened to 
such varied cries) to see the Great War as a mere 
folly, a thing without motive, such as the emptiest 
internationals conceive the thing to have been. 

So much for the example of the war. It is 
explicable as a challenge to the tradition of Europe. 
It is inexplicable on any other ground. The 
Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of 
Europe : he alone can see and judge in this matter. 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 15 

From so recent and universal an example I turn 
to one local, distant, precise, in which this same 
Catholic Conscience of European history may be 
tested. 

Consider the particular (and clerical) example 
of Thomas a Becket : The Story of St. Thomas of 
Canterbury. 

I defy any man to read the story of Thomas a 
Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in 
any other of our Protestant handbooks, and to 
make head or tail of it. 

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of 
study. It concerns only a few years. A great 
deal is known about it, for there are many con- 
temporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast 
interest to history. The Catholic may well ask : 
" How is it I cannot understand the story as told 
by these Protestant writers ? Why does it not 
make sense ? " 

The story is briefly this : 

A certain prelate, the Primate of England at 
the time, was asked to admit certain changes in 
the status of the clergy. The chief of these changes 
was that men attached to the Church in any way 
even by minor orders (not necessarily priests) 
should, if they committed a crime amenable to 



16 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

temporal jurisdiction, be brought before the ordinary 
courts of the country instead of left, as they had 
been for centuries, to their own courts. The claim 
was, at the time, a novel one. The Primate of 
England resisted that claim. In connection with 
his resistance he was subjected to many indignities, 
many things outrageous to custom were done 
against him ; but the Pope doubted whether his 
resistance was justified, and he was finally re- 
conciled with the civil authority. On returning 
to his See at Canterbury he became at once the 
author of further action and the subject of further 
outrage, and within a short time he was murdered 
by his exasperated enemies. 

His death raised a vast public outcry. His 
monarch did penance for it. But all the points on 
which he had resisted were in practice waived by 
the Church at last. The civil state's original claim 
was in practice recognised at last. To-day it 
appears to be plain justice. The chief of St. 
Thomas's contentions, for instance, that men in 
Orders should be exempt from the ordinary courts, 
seems as remote as chain armour. 

So far, so good. The opponent of the Faith 
will say, and has said in a hundred studies, that 
this resistance was nothing more than that always 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 17 

offered by an old organisation to a new develop- 
ment. 

Of course it was ! It is equally true to say of 
a man who objects to an aeroplane smashing in the 
top of his studio that it is the resistance of an old 
organisation to a new development. But such a 
phrase in no way explains the business ; and when 
the Catholic begins to examine the particular case 
of St. Thomas, he finds a great many things to 
wonder at and to think about, upon which his less 
European opponents are helpless and silent. 

I say " helpless," because in their attitude they 
give up trying to explain. They record these 
things, but they are bewildered by them. They 
can explain St. Thomas's particular action simply 
enough : too simply. He was (they say) a man 
living in the past. But when they are asked to 
explain the vast consequences that followed his 
martyrdom, they have to fall back upon the most 
inhuman and impossible hypotheses : that " the 
masses were ignorant " — that is as compared with 
other periods in human history ( — what ! more 
ignorant than to-day? — ); that "the Papacy 
engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm." 
As though the Papacy were a secret society like 
Modern Freemasonry, with some hidden machinery 



18 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

for " engineering " such things. As though the 
type of enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom 
was the wretched mechanical thing produced now 
by Caucus or newspaper "engineering"! As 
though nothing besides such interference was there 
to rouse the whole populace of Europe to such a 
pitch ! 

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took 
place at St. Thomas's tomb, the historian who hates 
or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways of 
denying them. The first is to say nothing about 
them. It is the easiest way of telling a lie. The 
second is to say that they were the result of a vast 
conspiracy which the Priests directed and the feeble 
acquiescence of the maim, the halt, and the blind 
supported. The third (and for the moment most 
popular) is to give them modern journalistic names, 
sham Latin and Greek confused, which, it is hoped, 
will get rid of the miraculous character ; notably 
do such people talk of " auto-suggestion." 

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful 
story, when he has read all the original documents, 
understands it easily enough from within. 

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas 
was not very important in its special claims, and 
was (taken as an isolated action) not a little un- 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 19 

reasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads, 
and as he notes the rapid and profound transforma- 
tion of all civilisation which was taking place in 
that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out 
for a principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, 
but absolute in its general application : the freedom 
of the Church. He stood out in particular for what 
had been the concrete symbols of the Church's 
liberty in the past. The direction of his action 
was everything, whether his symbol were well or 
ill chosen. The particular customs might go. But 
to challenge the new claims of civil authority at 
that moment was to save the Church. A move- 
ment was afoot which might have then everywhere 
accomplished what was only accomplished in parts 
of Europe four hundred years later, to wit, a 
dissolution of the unity and the discipline of 
Christendom. 

St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by 
the enemy ; he fought and he resisted in the spirit 
dictated by the Church. He fought for no dogma- 
tic point ; he fought for no point to which the 
Church of nine hundred years earlier or five hundred 
years later would have attached importance. He 
fought for things which were purely temporal 
arrangements, which had indeed until quite 



20 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

recently been the guarantee of the Church's liberty, 
but which were in his time upon the turn of be- 
coming negligible. But the spirit in which he 
fought was a determination that the Church should 
never be controlled by the civil power; and the 
spirit against which he fought was the spirit which 
either openly or secretly believes the Church to be 
an Institution merely human, and therefore natur- 
ally subjected, as an inferior, to the processes of 
the Monarch's (or, worse, the politician's) law. 

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that 
St. Thomas was obviously and necessarily to lose, 
in the long run, every concrete point on which he 
had stood out, and that yet he saved through- 
out Europe the ideal thing for which he was 
standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why 
the enthusiasm of the populace rose ; the guarantee 
of the plain man's healthy and moral existence 
against the threat of the wealthy and the power 
of the State — the self-government of the general 
Church — had been defended by a champion up to 
the point of death : and the Morals enforced by 
the Church are the guarantee-of freedom. 

Further, the Catholic reader is not content, as is 
the non-Catholic, with a blind, irrational assertion 
that the miracles could not take place. He is not 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 21 

wholly possessed of a firm and living Faith that 
no marvellous events ever take place. He reads 
the evidence. He cannot believe that there was 
a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all proof 
of such conspiracy). He is moved to a conviction 
that events so minutely recorded and so amply 
testified happened. Here again is the European, 
the chiefly reasonable man, the Catholic, pitted 
against the Barbarian sceptic with his empty, un- 
proved, mechanical dogmas of material sequence. 

And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are 
but the extreme points fitting in with the whole 
scheme. He knows what European civilisation 
was before the twelfth century. He knows what 
it was to become after the sixteenth. He knows 
why and how the Church would stand out against 
a certain itch for change. He appreciates why and 
how a character like that of St. Thomas would 
resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that 
the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees 
that it succeeded so thoroughly in its spirit as to 
prevent, in a moment when its occurrence would 
have been far more dangerous and general than in 
the sixteenth century, the overturning of the 
connection between Church and State. 

The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly 



22 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

comprehends. He grasps the connection between 
that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended 
St. Thomas's intercession ; not because the miracles 
were fantasies, but because a popular recognition 
of deserved sanctity is the later accompaniment 
and the recipient of miraculous power. 

It is the details of history which require the 
closest analysis. I have, therefore, chosen a 
significant detail with which to exemplify my case. 

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the 
character of the English squires and of their 
position in the English countryside would have to 
explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a 
foreigner how and why the evils of the English 
large estates were, though evils, national ; just as 
a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity 
or violence might afford him a special test ; so the 
martyrdom of St. Thomas makes, for the Catholic 
who is viewing Europe, a very good example 
whereby he can show how well he understands 
what is to other men not understandable, and how 
simple is to him, and how human, a process which, 
to men not Catholic, can only be explained by the 
most grotesque assumptions: — as, that universal 
contemporary testimony must be ignored ; that 
men are ready to die for things in which they do 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 23 

not believe ; that the philosophy of a society does 
not permeate that society ; or that a popular 
enthusiasm, ubiquitous and unchallenged, is 
mechanically produced to the order of some 
centre of government ! All these absurdities are 
connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great 
quarrel, nor is there any but the Catholic 
conscience of Europe that explains it. 

The Catholic sees that the whole of the a Becket 
business was like the struggle of a man who is 
fighting for his liberty and is compelled to 
maintain it (such being the battle-ground chosen 
by his opponents) upon a privilege inherited from 
the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot under- 
stand it and does not pretend to understand it. 

Now let us turn from this second example, 
highly definite and limited, to a third, quite 
different from either of the other two and the 
widest of all. Let us turn to the general aspect 
of all European history. We can here make a list 
of the great lines on which the Catholic can 
appreciate what other men only puzzle at, and 
can determine and know those things upon which 
other men make no more than a guess. 

The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman 
world, not because the Jews were widely dis- 



24 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

persed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and 
especially the Roman intellect, accepted it in its 
maturity. 

The material decline of the Empire is not co- 
relative with, nor parallel to, the growth of the 
Catholic Church ; it is the counterpart of that 
growth. You have been told, " Christianity (a 
word, by the way, quite unhistorical) crept into 
Rome as she declined, and hastened that decline." 
That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase 
and retain it : " The Faith is that which Rome 
accepted in her maturity ; nor was the Faith the 
cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of 
all that could be conserved." 

There was no strengthening of us by the 
advent of barbaric blood ; there was a serious 
imperilling of civilisation in its old age by some 
small (and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric 
blood ; if civilisation so attacked did not per- 
manently fail through old age we owe that happy 
rescue to the Catholic Faith. 

In the next period — the Dark Ages — the 
Catholic proceeds to see Europe saved against a 
universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, 
the Scandinavian : he notes that the fierceness of 
the attack was such that anything save something 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 25 

divinely instituted would have broken down. The 
Mohammedan came within three clays' march of 
Tours, the Mongol was seen from the walls of 
Tournus on the Saone — -right in France. The 
Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all 
the rivers of Gaul and almost overwhelmed the 
whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of 
Europe but a central core. 

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the re- 
florescence which followed that dark time — in the 
Middle Ages — the Catholic notes not hypotheses 
but documents and facts ; he sees the Parliaments 
arising not from some imaginary "teutonic" root 
— a figment of the academies — but from the very 
real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, 
in Britain, in Gaul — never outside the old limits o£ 
Christendom. He sees the Gothic architecture 
spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in 
the territory of Paris and thence spread outwards 
in a ring to the Scotch Highlands andjjto the 
Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product 
of the soul of Europe reawakened ; he sees the 
marvellous new civilisation of the Middle Ages 
rising as a transformation of the old Roman 
society, a transformation wholly from within, and 
motived by the Faith. 



26 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses 
of the fifteenth century, are to him the diseases of 
one body — Europe — in need of medicine. 

The medicine was too long delayed. There 
comes the disruption of the European body at 
the Reformation. 

It ought to be death ; but since the Church is 
not subject to mortal law it is not death. Of 
those populations which break away from religion 
and from civilisation none (he perceives) were of 
the ancient Roman stock — save Britain. The 
Catholic, reading his history, watches in that 
struggle England : not the effect of the struggle on 
the fringes of Europe, on Holland, North Germany, 
and the rest. He is anxious to see whether Britain 
will fail the mass of civilisation in its ordeal. 

He notes the keenness of the fight in England 
and its long endurance : how all the forces of 
wealth — especially the old families such as the 
Howards and the merchants of the City of London 
— are enlisted upon the treasonable side ; how, in 
spite of this, a tenacious tradition prevents any 
sudden transformation of the British polity or its 
sharp severance from the continuity of Europe. He 
sees the whole of North England rising, cities in the 
south standing siege. Ultimately he sees the great ' 



CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 27 

nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut 
off, apparently for ever, from the life by which they 
had lived, the food upon which they had fed. 

Side by side with all this he notes that, next to 
Britain, one land only that was never Roman land, 
by an accident inexplicable or miraculous, preserves 
the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side by 
side with that loss the preservation of Ireland. 

To the Catholic reader of history (though he 
has no Catholic history to read) there is no danger 
of the foolish bias against civilisation which has 
haunted so many contemporary writers, and which 
has led them to frame fantastic origins for 
institutions the growth of which are as plain as 
an historical fact can be. He does not see in the 
Pirate raids which desolated the eastern and south- 
eastern coasts of England in the sixth century the 
origin of the English people. He perceives that 
the success of these small lowland settlements upon 
the eastern shores, and the spread of their language 
westward over the island dated from their accept- 
ance of Roman discipline, organisation, and law, 
from which the majority, the Welsh to the west, 
were cut off. He sees that the ultimate hegemony 
of Winchester over Britain all grew from this early 
picking up of communications with the Continent 



28 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

and the cutting off of everything in this island 
save the south and east from the common life of 
Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are 
not dimly and possibly barbaric, but certainly and 
plainly monastic in their origin ; he is not surprised 
to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean 
valleys during the struggle against the Moham- 
medans ; he sees how probable or necessary was 
such an origin just when the chief effort of Europe 
was at work in the Reconquista. 

In general the history of Europe and of England 
develops naturally before the Catholic reader ; he 
is not tempted to that succession of theories, self- 
contradicting and often put forward for the sake of 
novelty, which has confused and warped modern 
reconstructions of the past. Above all, he does 
not commit the prime historical error of "reading 
history backwards." He does not think of the 
past as a groping towards our own perfection of 
to-day. He has in his own nature the nature of 
its career : he feels the fall and the rise — the rhythm 
of a life which is his own. 

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse 
with the first century or the fifteenth ; shrines are 
not odd to him nor oracles ; and if he is the 
supplanter he is also the heir of the Gods. 



I 

WHAT WAS THE EOMAN EMPIRE? 



29 



I 

WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 

The history of European civilisation is the history 
of a certain political institution which united and 
expressed Europe, and was governed from Rome. 
This institution was informed at its very origin by 
the growing influence of a certain definite and 
organised religion ; this religion it ultimately 
accepted and, finally, was merged in. 

The institution — having accepted the religion, 
having made of that religion its official expression, 
and having breathed that religion in through every 
part until it became the spirit of the whole — was 
slowly modified, spiritually illumined, and physic- 
ally degraded by age. But it did not die. It 
was revived by the religion which had become its 
new soul. It re-arose and still lives. 

This institution was first known among men 
as res public a : we call it to-day " The Roman 
Empire." The Religion which informed and saved 
it was then called, still is called, and will always be 
called "The Catholic Church." 

31 



32 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe. 

It is immaterial to the historical value of this 
historical truth whether it be presented to a man 
who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man who 
believes everything the Church may teach. A 
man remote in distance, in time, or in mental 
state from the thing we are about to examine 
would perceive the reality of this truth just as 
clearly as would a man who was steeped in its 
spirit from within and who formed an intimate 
part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the 
contemporary atheist, some supposed student in 
some remote future, reading history in some place 
from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly 
departed, and to which the habits and traditions 
of our civilisation will therefore be wholly alien, 
would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as 
clearly as it is grasped to-day by the Catholic 
student who is of European birth, the truth that 
Europe and the Catholic Church were and are 
one thing. The only people who do not grasp it 
(or do not admit it) are those writers of history 
whose special, local, and temporary business it is 
to oppose the Catholic Church, or who have a 
traditional bias against it. 

These men are numerous ; they have formed, in 
the Protestant and other anti-Catholic universities, 
a whole school of hypothetical and unreal history, 
in which, though the original workers are few, 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 33 

their copyists are innumerable : and that School of 
unreal History is still dogmatically taught in the 
anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world. 

Now our quarrel with this School should be, not 
that it is anti-Catholic — that concerns another 
sphere of thought — but that it is unhistorical. 

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire 
with its institutions and its spirit was the sole 
origin of European civilisation ; to forget or to 
diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its 
maturity a certain religion ; to conceal the fact 
that this religion was not a mood but a determinate 
and highly organised corporation ; to present in 
the first centuries some non-existent "Christianity" 
in place of the existent Church ; to suggest that 
the Faith was a vague agreement among individual 
holders of opinions instead of what it historically 
was, the doctrine of a fixed authoritative institu- 
tion ; to fail to identify that institution with the 
institution still here to-day and still called the 
Catholic Church ; to exaggerate the insignificant 
Barbaric influences which came from outside the 
Empire and did nothing to modify its spirit ; to 
pretend that the Empire or its religion have at any 
time ceased to be — that is, to pretend that there 
has ever been a solution of continuity between the 
past and the present of Europe — all these preten- 
sions are parts of one historical falsehood. 

In all by which we Europeans differ from the 

D 



34 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

rest of mankind there is nothing which was not 
originally peculiar to the Roman Empire or is not 
demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it. 
In material objects the whole of our wheeled 
traffic, our building materials, brick, glass, mortar, 
cut-stone, our cooking, our staple food and drink ; 
in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the 
tower, the well, the road, the canal ; in expression, 
the alphabet, the very words of most of our 
numerous dialects and polite languages, the order 
of still more, the logical sequence of our thought, 
■ — all spring from that one source. So with imple- 
ments : the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, 
the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, 
the ladder ; all these we have from that same 
origin. Of our institutions it is the same story. 
The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the 
parish, the county, the province, the fixed national 
traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement 
of the great European cities, the routes of com- 
munication between them, the universities, the 
Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their juris- 
prudence ; all these derive entirely from the old 
Roman Empire, our well-spring. 

It may here be objected that to connect so closely 
the worldly foundations of our civilisation with 
the Catholic or universal religion of it is to limit 
the latter and to make of it a merely human thing. 

The accusation would be historically valueless in 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 35 

any case, for in history we. are not concerned with 
the claims of the supernatural, but with a sequence 
of proved events in the natural order. But if we 
leave the province of history and consider that of 
theology, the argument is equally baseless. Every 
manifestation of divine influence among men must 
have its human circumstance of place and time. 
The Church might have arisen under divine provi- 
dence in any spot ; it did, as a fact, spring up in 
the high Greek tide of the Levant and carries to this 
day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at 
any time : it did, as a fact, rise just at the inception 
of that united Imperial Roman system which we are 
about to examine. It might have carried for its 
ornaments and have had for its sacred language the 
accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other 
great civilisations, living or dead : of Assyria, of 
Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter 
of historical fact the Church was so circumstanced 
in its origin and development that its external 
accoutrement and its language were those of the 
Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome : of the 
Empire. 

Now those who would falsify history from a 
conscious or unconscious bias against the Catholic 
Church will do so in many ways, some of which 
will always prove contradictory of some others. 
For truth is one, error disparate and many. 

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be 



36 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

compared to the violent, continual, but inchoate 
attack of barbarians upon some civilised fortress ; 
such an attack will proceed now from this direction, 
now from that, along any one of the infinite 
number of directions from which a single point 
may be approached. To-day there is attack from 
the North, to-morrow an attack from the South. 
Their directions are flatly contradictory ; but the 
contradiction is explained by the fact that each is 
directed against a central and fixed opponent. 

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the 
Roman Empire as a pagan institution ; they will 
pretend that the Catholic Church was something 
alien to that pagan thing ; that the Empire was 
great and admirable before Catholicism came, weak 
and despicable upon its acceptation of the Creed. 
They will represent the Faith as creeping like an 
Oriental disease into the body of a firm Western 
society which it did not so much transform as 
liquefy and dissolve. 

Others will take the clean contrary line and 
make out a despicable Roman Empire to have 
fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous 
barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all 
manner of splendid pagan qualities — which usually 
turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant 
qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased 
Catholic body of the Roman Empire which they are 
pictured as attacking. 



WHAT WAS THE EOMAN EMPIRE? 37 

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat 
the Empire and its institutions as dead after a 
certain date, and discuss the rise of a new society 
without considering its Catholic and Imperial 
origins. Nothing is commoner, for instance (in 
English schools), than for boys to be taught that 
the pirate raids and settlements of the fifth century 
in this Island were the " coming of the English," 
and the complicated history of Britain is simplified 
for them into a story of how certain bold seafaring 
pagans (full of all the virtues we ascribe to our- 
selves to-day) first devastated, then occupied, and 
at last, of their sole genius, developed a land which 
Roman civilisation had proved inadequate to hold. 

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error 
(conscious or unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, 
according to the degree of learning in him who 
propagates it) which treats of the religious life of 
Europe as though it were something quite apart 
from the general development of our civilisation. 

There are innumerable text -books in which a 
man may read the whole history of his own, a 
European, country, from say the fifth to the 
sixteenth century, and never hear of the Blessed 
Sacrament : which is as though a man were to write 
of England in the nineteenth century without 
daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies. 
Warped by such historical enormities, the reader is 
at a loss to understand the ordinary motives of his 



38 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the 
history of the Church obviously escape him, but 
much more do the great crises in civil history escape 
him. 

To set right, then, our general view of history 
it is necessary to be ready with a sound answer 
to the prime question of all, which is this : " What 
was the Roman Empire ? " 

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the 
United States to-day and let him have a full 
knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil 
War ; if you gave him of the Civil War itself a 
partial, confused, and very summary account ; if 
of all that went before it, right away back to the 
first Colonists, you were to leave him either wholly 
ignorant or ludicrously misinformed (and slightly 
informed at that), what then could he make of the 
problems in American Society, or how would he be 
equipped to understand the nation of which he 
was to be a citizen ? To give such a man the 
elements of civic training you must let him know 
what the Colonies were, what the War of Inde- 
pendence, and what the main institutions preceding 
that event and created by it. He would have 
further to know soundly the struggle between 
North and South, and the principles underlying that 
struggle. Lastly, and most important of all, he 
would have to see all this in a correct perspective. 

So it is with us in the larger question of that 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 39 

general civilisation which is common to both 
Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigour 
has extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and 
Africa. We cannot understand it to-day unless 
we understand what it developed from. What 
was the origin from which we sprang ? What was 
the Roman Empire ? 

The Roman Empire was a united civilisation, 
the prime characteristic of which was the accepta- 
tion, absolute and unconditional, of one common 
mode of life by all those who dwelt within its 
boundaries. It is an idea very difficult for the 
modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to a 
number of sovereign countries more or less sharply 
differentiated, and each separately coloured, as it 
were, by different customs, a different language, 
and often a different religion. Thus the modern 
man sees France French speaking, with an archi- 
tecture, manners, laws of its own, etc. ; he saw (till 
yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian 
hegemony, German speaking, with yet another set 
of institutions, and so forth. When he thinks, 
therefore, of any great conflict of opinion, such as 
the discussion between aristocracy and democracy 
to-day, he thinks in terms of different countries. 
Ireland, for instance, is Democratic, England is 
Aristocratic — and so forth. 

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, 
however united, as something bounded by, and in 



40 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

contrast with, other communities. When he writes 
or thinks of France he does not think of France 
only, but of the points in which France contrasts 
with England, North Germany, South Germany, 
Italy, etc. 

Now the men living in the Roman Empire 
regarded civic life in a totally different way. All 
conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) 
were antagonisms within one State. No differen- 
tiation of State against State was conceivable or 
was attempted. 

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, 
from the North Sea to the Sahara and the Middle 
Nile, all was one State. 

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in 
the eyes of the Imperial citizen, a sort of waste. 
It was not thickly populated, it had no appreciable 
arts or sciences, it was barbaric. That outside 
waste of sparse and very inferior tribes was 
something of a menace upon the frontiers, or, to 
speak more accurately, something of an irritation. 
But that menace or irritation was never conceived 
of as we conceive of the menace of a foreign power. 
It was merely the trouble of preventing a fringe 
of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric com- 
munities outside the boundaries from doing harm 
to a vast, rich, thickly populated, and highly 
organised state within. 

The members of these communities (principally 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 41 

the Dutch, Frisian, Rhenish, and other Germanic 
peoples, but also, on the other frontiers, the Nomads 
of the desert, and in the West Islanders and 
mountaineers, Irish and Caledonian) were all tinged 
with the great Empire on which they bordered. Its 
trade permeated them. We find its coins every- 
where. Its names for most things became part of 
their speech. They thought in terms of it. They had 
a sort of grievance when they were not admitted 
to it. They perpetually begged for admittance. 

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy 
its luxury, now and then to raid little portions of 
its frontier wealth. 

They never dreamt of " conquest." On the 
other hand the Roman administrator was concerned 
with getting Barbarians to settle in an orderly 
manner on the frontier fields, so that he could 
exploit their labour, with coaxing them to serve 
as mercenaries in the Roman armies, or (when there 
was any local conflict) with defeating them in local 
battles, taking them prisoners and making them 
slaves. 

I have said that the mere number of these 
exterior men (German, Caledonian, Irish, Slav, 
Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with the 
numbers of civilisation, and, I repeat, in the eyes 
of the citizens of the Empire their lack of culture 
made them more insignificant still. 

At only one place did the Roman Empire have 



42 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

a common frontier with another civilisation, 
properly so called. It was a very short frontier, 
not one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the 
Empire. It was the Eastern or Persian frontier, 
guarded by spaces largely desert. And though a 
true civilisation lay beyond, that civilisation was 
never of great extent nor really powerful. This 
frontier was variously drawn at various times, but 
corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia. 
The Mediterranean peoples of the Levant, from 
Antioch to Judaea, were always within that frontier. 
They were Roman. The mountain peoples of 
Persia were always beyond it. Nowhere else was 
there any real rivalry or contact with the foreigner, 
and even this rivalry and contact (though " The 
Persian War" is the only serious foreign or equal 
war in the eyes of all the rulers from Julius Caesar 
to the sixth century) counted for little in the 
general life of Rome. 

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, 
nor too often repeated, so strange is it to our 
modern modes of thought, and so essentially 
characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian 
era and the formative period during which Christian 
civilisation took its shape. Men lived as citizens 
of one State which they took for granted and which 
they even regarded as eternal. There would be 
much grumbling against the taxes and here and 
there revolts against them, but never a suggestion 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 43 

that the taxes should be levied by any other than 
Imperial authority, or imposed in any other than 
the Imperial manner. There was plenty of conflict 
between armies and individuals as to who should 
have the advantage of ruling, but never any doubt 
as to the type of function which the " Emperor " 
filled, nor as to the type of universally despotic 
action which he exercised. There were any number 
of little local liberties and customs which were the 
pride of the separate places to which they attached, 
but there was no conception of such local differences 
being antagonistic to the one life of the one State. 
That State was, for the men of that time, the 
World. 

The complete unity of this social system was 
the more striking from the fact that it underlay 
not only such innumerable local customs and 
liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic 
opinions, of religious practices, and of dialects. 
There was not even one current official language 
for the educated thought of the Empire : there 
were two, Greek and Latin. And in every depart- 
ment of human life there co-existed this very large 
liberty of individual and local expression, coupled 
with a complete and as it were necessary unity, 
binding the whole vast body together. Emperor 
might succeed Emperor in a series of civil wars. 
Several Emperors might be reigning together. The 
office of Emperor might even be officially and con- 



44 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

sciously held in commission among four or more 
men. But the power of the Emperor was always 
one power, his office one office, and the system of 
the Empire one system. 

It is not the purpose of these few pages to 
attempt a full answer to the question of how such 
a civic state of mind came to be, but the reader 
must have some sketch of its development if he is 
to grasp its nature. 

The old Mediterranean world out of which the 
Empire grew had consisted (before that Empire was 
completed — say from an unknown and most distant 
past to 50 B.C.) in two types of society : there 
stood in it as rare exceptions States, or nations in 
our modern sense, governed by a central Govern- 
ment, which controlled a large area, and were 
peopled by the inhabitants of many towns and 
villages. Of this sort was ancient Egypt. But 
there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in 
such great numbers as to form the predominant 
type of society, a series of Cities, some of them 
commercial ports, most of them controlling a small 
area from which they drew their agricultural sub- 
sistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that 
their citizens drew their civic life, felt patriotism 
for, were the soldiers of, and paid their taxes to, 
not a nation in our sense but a municipality. 

These cities and the small surrounding territories 
which they controlled (which, I repeat, were often 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 45 

no more than local agricultural areas necessary for 
the sustenance of the town) were essentially the 
sovereign Powers of the time. Community of 
language, culture, and religion might, indeed, bind 
them in associations more or less strict. One could 
talk of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and 
so forth. But the individual City was always the 
unit. City made war on City. The City decided 
its own customs, and was the nucleus of religion. 
The God was the God of the city. A rim of such 
points encircled the Eastern and Central Mediter- 
ranean wherever it was habitable by man. Even 
the little oasis of the Cyrenaean land with sand on 
every side, but habitable, developed its city forma- 
tions. Even on the western coasts of the inland 
ocean, which received their culture by sea from the 
East, such City States, though more rare, dotted 
the littorals of Algeria, Provence, and Spain. 

Three hundred years before Our Lord was born 
this moral equilibrium was disturbed by the huge 
and successful adventure of the Macedonian 
Alexander. 

The Greek City States had just been swept 
under the hegemony of Macedon when in the shape 
of small but invincible armies the common Greek 
culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. 
Egypt, the Levant, and much more were turned 
into one Hellenised (that is, " Greecifled " ) civilisa- 
tion. The separate cities, of course, survived, and 



46 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

after Alexander's death unity of control was lost 
in various and fluctuating dynasties derived from 
the arrangements and quarrels of his generals. 
But the old moral equilibrium was gone and the 
conception of a general civilisation had appeared. 
Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew, the Egyptian 
saw with Greek eyes and the Greek tongue was 
the medium of all the East for a thousand years. 
Hence are the very earliest names of Christian 
things, Bishop, Church, Priest, Baptism, Christ, 
Greek names. Hence all our original documents 
and prayers are Greek and shine with a Greek 
light : nor are any so essentially Greek in idea as 
the four Catholic Gospels. 

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of 
accidents very difficult to follow (since we have 
only later accounts — and they are drawn from the 
city's point of view only), became the chief of the 
City States in the Peninsula. Some few it had 
conquered in war and had subjected to taxation 
and to the acceptation of its own laws ; many it 
protected by a sort of superior alliance ; with many 
more its position was ill-defined and perhaps in 
origin had been a position of allied equality. But 
at any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Hellenisa- 
tion of the East this city had in a slower and less 
universal way begun to break down the moral 
equilibrium of the City States in Italy and had 
produced between the Apennines and the sea (and 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 47 

in some places beyond the Apennines) a society 
in which the City State, though of course surviving, 
was no longer isolated or sovereign, but formed 
part of a larger and already definite scheme. The 
city which had arrived at such a position, and 
which was now the manifest capital of the Italian 
scheme, was Rome. 

Contemporary with the last successes of this 
development in Italy went a rival development 
very different in its nature, but bound to come 
into conflict with the Roman because it also was 
extending. This was the commercial development 
of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that is, a 
Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life 
like all the rest. It had shown neither the 
aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for 
conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread 
of its spirit and for the domination of its laws 
and modes of thought. The business of Carthage 
was to enrich itself: not indirectly as do soldiers 
(who achieve riches as but one consequence of the 
pursuit of arms), but directly, as do merchants, by 
using men cunningly, by commerce, and by the 
exploitation of contract. 

The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in 
Spain, and harbours wherever he could find them, 
especially in the Western Mediterranean. He 
employed mercenary troops. He made no attempt 
to radiate outward slowly step by step, as does the 



48 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

military type, but, true to the type of every 
commercial empire, from his own time to our own, 
the Carthaginian built up a scattered hotch-potch 
of dominion, bound together by what is to-day 
called the " Command of the Sea." 

That command was long absolute and Cartha- 
ginian power depended on it wholly. But such a 
power could not co-exist with the growing strength 
of Martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage ; and, 
after a prodigious struggle, which lasted to within 
two hundred years of the birth of our Lord, ruined 
the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the 
town itself was destroyed by the Romans, and its 
territory turned into a Roman province. So 
perished for many hundred years the dangerous 
illusion that the merchant can master the soldier : 
but never had that illusion seemed nearer to the 
truth than at certain moments in the duel between 
Carthage and Rome. 

The main consequence of this success was 
that, by the nature of the struggle, the Western 
Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its 
half-civilised Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau 
of Spain behind the cities of the littoral, the 
corresponding belt of Southern France, and the 
cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the 
Roman system, and became, but in a more united 
way, what Italy had already long before become. 
The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 49 

Roman confederation, with its ideas of law and 
government, was supreme in the Western Medi- 
terranean, and was compelled by its geographical 
position to extend itself inland further and further 
into Spain, and even (what was to be of prodigious 
consequence to the world) into Gaul. 

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation 
of Gaul] we must notice that in the hundred 
years after the final fall of Carthage the Eastern 
Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. 
This Western power, the Roman, thus finally 
established, occupied Corinth in the same decade 
as that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, 
and what had once been Greece became a Roman 
province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian East — 
Syria, Egypt — followed. The Macedonian power 
in its provinces came to depend upon the Roman 
system in a series of protectorates, annexations, 
and occupations, which two generations or so 
before the foundation of the Catholic Church had 
made Rome, though her system was Dot yet 
complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean 
world. The men whose sons lived to be con- 
temporary with the Nativity saw that the unity 
of that world was already achieved. The World 
was now one ; and was built up of the islands, 
the peninsulas, and the littoral of the Inland Sea. 

So the Empire might have remained, and so one 
would think it naturally would have remained, a 



50 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Mediterranean thing, but for that capital ex- 
periment which has determined all future history — 
Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul — Gaul, the mass 
of which lay North, Continental, exterior to the 
Mediterranean : Gaul which linked up with the 
Atlantic and the North Sea : Gaul which lived by 
the tides : Gaul which was to be the foundation of 
things to come. 

It was this experiment — the Roman Conquest 
of Gaul — and its success which opened the ancient 
and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to 
the world. It was a revolution which for rapidity 
and completeness has no parallel. Something less 
than a hundred small Celtic States, partially 
civilised (but that in no degree comparable to the 
high life of the Mediterranean) were occupied, 
taught, and as it were " converted " into citizens of 
this now united Roman civilisation. 

It was all done within the lifetime of a man. 
The link and corner-stone of Western Europe, the 
quadrilateral which lies between the Pyrenees and 
the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, 
and the Channel, accepted civilisation in a manner 
so final and so immediate that no historian has 
ever been able to explain the phenomenon. Gaul 
accepted almost at once the Roman language, the 
Roman food, the Roman dress, and it formed the 
first — and a gigantic — extension of European 
culture. 



WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 51 

We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent 
and enduring example of that culture which 
survived when the Roman system fell into decay. 
Gaul led to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after 
the hardest struggle which any territory had 
presented, was also incorporated. By the close 
of the first century after the Incarnation, when 
the Catholic Church had already been obscurely 
founded in many a "city, and the turn of the world's 
history had come, the Roman Empire was finally 
established in its entirety. By that time, from the 
Syrian Desert to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to 
the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine 
and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay 
a secure and unquestioned method of living in- 
corporated as one great State. 

This State was to be the soil in which the seed 
of the Church was to be sown. As the religion of 
this State the Catholic Church was to develop. 
This State is still present, underlying our apparently 
complex political arrangements as the main rocks 
of a country underlie the drift of the surface. Its 
institutions of property and of marriage ; its con- 
ceptions of law ; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of 
Poetry, of Logic, are still the stuff of Europe. 
The religion which it made as universal as itself 
is still, and perhaps more notably than ever, 
apparent to all. 



II 

WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE 
ROMAN EMPIRE? 



53 



II 

WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE 
ROMAN EMPIRE ? 

So far I have attempted to answer the question 
" What was the Roman Empire ? " We have seen 
that it was an institution of such and such a 
character, but to this we had to add that it was 
an institution affected from its origin, and at last 
permeated by, another institution. This other 
institution had (and has) for its name " The Catholic 
Church." 

My next task must therefore be an attempt to 
answer the question "What was the Church in 
the Roman Empire?" for that I have not yet 

touched. 

In order to answer this question we shall do 
well to put ourselves in the place of a man living 
in a particular period, from whose standpoint the 
nature of the connection between the Church and 
the Empire can best be observed. And that stand- 
point in time is the generation which lived through 
the close of the second century and on into the 

65 



56 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

latter half of the third century : say from a.d. 190 
to a.d. 270. It is the first moment in which we 
can perceive the Church as a developed organism 
now apparent to all. 

If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in 
a world where the growing Church was still but 
slightly known and by most people unheard of. 
We can get no earlier view of it as part of the 
society around it. It is from about this time also 
that many documents survive. I shall show that 
the appearance of the Church at this time, from 
150 to 240 years after the Crucifixion, is ample 
evidence of her original constitution. 

A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus 
Aurelius, living through the violent civil wars that 
succeeded the peace of the Antonines, surviving to 
witness the Decian persecution of the Church and 
in extreme old age to perceive the promise, though 
not the establishment, of an untrammelled Catholi- 
cism (it had yet to pass through the last and most 
terrible of the persecutions), would have been able 
to answer our question well. He would have lived 
at the turn of the tide : a witness to the emergence, 
apparent to all Society, of the Catholic Church. 

Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial 
family in some great provincial town such as Lyons. 
He would find himself one of a comparatively small 
class of very wealthy men to whom was confined 
the municipal government of the city. Beneath 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 57 

him he would be accustomed to a large class of 
citizens, free men but not senatorial ; beneath these 
again his society reposed upon a very large body 
of slaves. 

In what proportion these three classes of society 
would have been found in a town like Lyons in 
the second century we have no exact documents to 
tell us, but we may infer from what we know of 
that society that the majority would certainly 
have been of the servile class, free men less numer- 
ous, while senators were certainly a very small 
body (they were the great landowners of the 
neighbourhood) ; and we must add to these three 
main divisions two other classes which complicate 
our view of that society. The first was that of the 
freed men, the second was made up of perpetual 
tenants, nominally free, but economically (and 
already partly in legal theory) bound to the 
wealthier classes. 

The freed men had risen from the servile class 
by the sole act of their masters. They were bound 
to these masters very strongly so far as social 
atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal 
theory as well. This preponderance of a small 
wealthy class we must not look upon as a stationary 
phenomenon : it was strengthening. In another 
half-dozen generations it was destined to form the 
outstanding feature of all Imperial society. In the 
fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman Empire 



58 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

became, from Pagan, Christian, the mark of the 
world was the possession of nearly all its soil and 
capital (apart from public land) by one small body 
of immensely wealthy men : the product of the 
pagan Empire. 

It is next important to remember that such a 
man as we are conceiving would never have re- 
garded the legal distinctions between slave and 
free as a line of cleavage between different kinds 
of men. It was a social arrangement and no more. 
Most of the slaves were, indeed, still chattel, bought 
and sold ; many of them were incapable of any 
true family life. But there was nothing uncommon 
in a slave's being treated as a friend, in his being 
a member of the liberal professions, in his acting 
as a tutor, as an administrator of his master's 
fortune, or a doctor. Certain official things he 
could not be ; he could not hold any public office, 
of course ; he could never plead ; and he could not 
be a soldier. 

This last point is essential ; because the Roman 
Empire, though it required no large armed force in 
comparison with the total numbers of its vast 
population (for it was not a system of mere re- 
pression — no such system has ever endured), yet 
could only draw that armed force from a restricted 
portion of the population. In the absence of 
foreign adventure or Civil Wars, the armies were 
mainly used as frontier police. Yet, small as they 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 59 

were, it was not easy to obtain the recruitment 
required. The wealthy citizen we are considering 
would have been expected to "find" a certain 
number of recruits for the services of the army. 
He found them among his bound free tenants and 
enfranchised slaves ; he was increasingly reluctant 
to find them ; and they were increasingly reluctant 
to serve. Later recruitment was found more and 
more from the barbarians outside the Empire ; and 
we shall see on a subsequent page how this affected 
the transition from the ancient world to that of the 
Dark Ages. 

Let us imagine such a man going through the 
streets of Lyons of a morning to attend a meeting 
of the Curia. He would salute, and be saluted, as 
he passed, by many men of the various classes I 
have described. Some, though slaves, he would 
greet familiarly ; others, though nominally free 
and belonging to his own following or to that of 
some friend, he would regard with less attention. 
He would be accompanied, it may be presumed, by 
a small retinue, some of whom might be freed men 
of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant class, 
some in legal theory quite independent of him, and 
yet by the economic necessities of the moment 
practically his dependents. 

As he passes through the streets he notes the 
temples dedicated to a variety of services. No 
creed dominated the city ; even the local gods 



60 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

were now but a confused memory ; a religious 
ritual of the official type was to greet him upon his 
entry to the Assembly, but in the public life of the 
city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared. 

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two 
perhaps would have struck his attention ; the one 
the great and showy synagogue where the local 
Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a small 
Christian Church. The first of these he would 
look on as one looks to-day upon the mark of an 
alien colony in some great modern city. He knew 
it to be the symbol of a small, reserved, unsym- 
pathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout the 
Empire. The Empire had had trouble with it in 
the past, but that trouble was long forgotten ; the 
little colonies of Jews had become negotiators, 
highly separate from their fellow-citizens, already 
unpopular, but nothing more. 

With the Christian Church it would be other- 
wise. He would know as an administrator (we 
will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was 
endowed ; that it was possessed of property more or 
less legally guaranteed. It had a very definite 
position of its own among the congregations and 
corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well 
secured. He would further know as an adminis- 
trator (and this would more concern him — for the 
possession of property by so important a body 
would seem natural enough), that to this building 



THE CHUECH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 61 

and the corporation of which it was a symbol were 
attached an appreciable number of his fellow- 
citizens ; a small minority, of course, in any town 
of such a date (the first generation of the third 
century), but a minority most appreciable and 
most worthy of his concern from three very 
definite characteristics : (1) In the first place it 
was certainly growing ; (2) in the second place it 
was certainly, even after so many generations of 
growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel ; (3) in 
the third place (and this was the capital point) it 
represented a true political organism — the only 
subsidiary organism which had risen within the 
general body of the Empire. 

If the reader will retain no other one of the 
points I am making in this description, let him 
retain this point : it is, from the historical point of 
view, the explanation of all that was to follow. 
The Catholic Church in Lyons would have been for 
that Senator a distinct organism, with its own 
officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of 
vitality, which, if he were a wise man, he would 
know was certain to endure and to grow, and 
which, even if he were but a. superficial and unin- 
telligent spectator, he would recognise as unique. 

Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church 
included all classes and kinds of men, and like the 
Empire itself, within which it was growing, it 
regarded all classes of its own members as subject 



62 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

to it within its own sphere. The senator, the 
tenant, the freed man, the slave, the soldier, in so 
far as they were members of this corporation, were 
equally bound to certain observances. Did they 
neglect these observances, the corporation would 
expel them or subject them to penalties of its own. 
He knew that though misunderstandings and fables 
existed with regard to this body, there was no 
social class in which its members had not propa- 
gated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and 
it would disturb him to know) that its organisation, 
though in no way admitted by law, and purely 
what we should call " voluntary," was strict and 
very formidable. 

Here in Lyons, as elsewhere, it was under a 
monarchical head called by the Greek name of 
Episcopos. Greek was a language which the 
cultured knew and used throughout the western 
or Latin part of the empire to which he belonged ; 
the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien, 
any more than would be the Greek title of 
"Presbyter" — the name of the official priests 
acting under this monarchical head of the organ- 
isation, or than would the Greek title " Diaconos," 
which title was attached to an order just below 
the priests, which was comprised of the inferior 
officials of the clerical body. 

He knew that this particular cult, like the 
innumerable others that were represented by the 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 63 

various sacred buildings of the city, had its 
mysteries, its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which 
these, the officials of its body, might alone engage, 
and which the mass of the local " Christians " — for 
such was their popular name — attended as a con- 
gregation. But he would further know that this 
scheme of worship differed wholly from any other 
of the many observances round it by a certain 
fixity of definition. The Catholic Church was 
not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy ; 
it was not a theory nor a habit ; it was a clearly 
delineated body corporate based on numerous 
exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and 
of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other 
body of men at that time, with passionate con- 
viction. 

By this I do not mean that the Senator so walk- 
ing to his official duties could not have recalled 
from among his own friends more than one who 
was attached to the Christian body in a negligent 
sort of way, perhaps by the influence of his wife, 
. perhaps by a tradition inherited from his father : 
he would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly 
growing body counted very many members who 
were indifferent and some, perhaps, who were 
ignorant of its full doctrine. But the body as a 
whole, in its general spirit, and especially in the 
disciplined organisation of its hierarchy, did 
differ from everything round it in this double 



64 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

character of precision and conviction. There was 
no certitude left and no definite spirit or mental 
aim, no " dogma " (as we should say to-day) taken 
for granted in the Lyons of his time, save among 
the Christians. 

The pagan masses were attached, without definite 
religion, to a number of customs. In social morals 
they were guided by certain institutions, at the 
foundation of which were the Roman ideas of 
property in men, land, and goods ; patriotism, the 
bond of smaller societies, had long ago merged 
in the conception of a universal empire. This 
Christian Church alone represented a complete 
theory of life, to which men were attached, as 
they had, hundreds of years before, been attached 
to their local city, with its local gods and intense 
corporate local life. 

Without any doubt the presence of that Church 
and of what it stood for would have concerned our 
Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a thing 
to be only occasionally observed. It was a per- 
manent force and, what is more, a state within the 
state. 

If he were like most of his kind in that genera- 
tion the Catholic Church would have affected him 
as an irritant ; its existence interfered with the 
general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a 
small minority even of the rich already were, in 
sympathy with it though not of it, it would still 



THE CHUECH IN THE EOMAN EMPIEE 65 

have concerned him. It was the only exceptional 
organism of his uniform time ; and it was growing. 

This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals 
with the business of the day. It includes com- 
plaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial 
taxes. He consults the lists and sees there (it was 
the fundamental conception of the whole of that 
society) men drawn up in grades of importance 
exactly corresponding to the amount of freehold 
land which each possessed. He has to vote, 
perhaps, upon some question of local repairs, the 
making of some new street, or the establishment of 
some monument. Probably he hears of some local 
quarrel provoked (he is told) by the small, segre- 
gated Christian body, and he follows the police 
report upon it. 

He leaves the Curia for his own business, and 
hears at home the accounts of his many farms, 
what deaths of slaves there have been, what has 
been the result of the harvest, what purchases of 
slaves or goods have been made, what difficulty 
there has been in recruiting among his tenantry 
for the army, and so forth. Such a man was con- 
cerned one way or another with perhaps a dozen 
large farming centres or villages, and had some 
thousands of human beings dependent upon him. 
In this domestic business he hardly comes across 
the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It 
was not yet rooted in the countryside. 



66 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

There might possibly, even at that distance 
from the frontiers, be rumours of some little in- 
cursion or other of barbarians ; perhaps a few 
hundred fighting men, come from the outer 
Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman 
garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of 
neighbouring barbarians ; or perhaps they were 
attempting to live by pillage in the neighbour- 
hood of the garrison, and the soldiers had been 
called out against them. He might have, from 
the hands of a friend in that garrison, a letter 
brought to him officially by the Imperial post, 
which was organised along all the great highways, 
telling him what had been done to the marauders 
or the suppliants ; how to some had, after capture, 
been allotted land to till under conditions nearly 
servile ; others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for the 
army. The news would never for a moment have 
suggested to him any coming danger to the society 
in which he lived. 

He would have passed from such affairs to 
recreations probably literary, and there would 
have been an end of his day. 

In such a day what we note as most exceptional 
is the aspect of the small Catholic body in a then 
pagan city, and we should remember, if we are 
to understand history, that by this time it was 
already the phenomenon which contemporaries 
were also beginning to note most carefully. 



THE CHUECH IN THE EOMAN EMPIRE 67 

That is a fair presentment of the manner in 
which a number of local affairs (including the 
Catholic Church in his City) would have struck 
such a man at such a time. 

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire 
as a whole, we must observe certain other things 
in the landscape, touching the Church and the 
society round it, which a local view cannot give 
us. In the first place there had been in that 
society from time to time acute spasmodic friction 
breaking out between the Imperial power and this 
separate voluntary organism, the Catholic Church. 
The Church's partial secrecy, its high vitality, its 
claim to independent administration, were the 
superficial causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, 
we know that the ultimate causes were more 
profound. The conflict was a conflict between 
Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the 
one hand, and what Jesus Christ Himself had 
called "the world." But it is unhistorical to think 
of a " Pagan " world opposed to a " Christian " 
world at that time. The very conception of " a 
Pagan World" requires some external manifest 
Christian civilisation against which to contrast it. 
There was none such, of course, for Rome in the 
first generation of the third century. The Church 
had around her a society in which education was 
very widely spread, intellectual curiosity very 
lively, a society largely sceptical, but interested 



68 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

to discover the right conduct of human life, and 
tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it 
could discover a final solution. 

It was a society of such individual freedom 
that it is difficult to speak of its " luxury " or its 
" cruelty." A cruel man could be cruel in it 
without suffering the punishment which centuries 
of Christian training would render natural to our 
ideas. But a merciful man could be, and would 
be, merciful and would preach mercy, and would 
be generally applauded. It was a society in which 
there were many ascetics ; — whole schools of 
thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure ; — but 
a society distinguished from the Christian particu- 
larly in this, that at bottom it thought of man as 
sufficient to himself and of all belief as mere 
opinion. 

Here was the great antithesis between the 
Church and her surroundings. It is an antithesis 
which has been revived to-day. To-day, outside 
the Catholic Church, there is no distinction 
between opinion and faith, nor any idea that 
man is other than sufficient to himself. 

The Church did not, and does not, believe man 
to be sufficient to himself, nor naturally in pos- 
session of those keys which would open the doors 
on to full knowledge or full social content. It 
proposed, and proposes, its doctrines to be held 
not as opinions but as a body of faith. 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 69 

It differed from — or was more solid than — all 
around it in this : that it proposed statement 
instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical 
facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated 
its ritual of "mysteries" as realities instead of 
symbols. 

A word as to the constitution of the Church. 
All men with an historical training know that the 
Church of the years 200-250 was what I have 
described it, an organised society under bishops, 
and, what is more, it is evident that there was a 
central primacy at Rome as well as local primacies 
in various other great cities. But what is not so 
generally emphasised is the way in which Christian 
society appears to have looked at itself at that 
time. 

The conception which the Catholic Church had 
of itself in the early third century can, perhaps, 
best be approached by pointing out that if we 
use the word " Christianity " we are unhistorical. 
" Christianity " is a term in the mouth and upon 
the pen of the post-Reformation writer ; it con- 
notes an opinion or a theory ; a point of view ; 
an idea. The Christians of the time of which I 
speak had no such conception. Upon the contrary, 
they were attached to its very antithesis. They 
were attached to the conception of a thing : of 
an organised body instituted for a definite end, 
disciplined in a definite way, and remarkable for 



70 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. 
One can talk, in speaking of the first three 
centuries, of stoicism, or epicureanism, or neo- 
platomsm ; but one cannot talk of " Christiamsm " 
or " ChrisU'sm." Indeed, no one has been so 
ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those 
phrases. But the current phrase " Christianity," 
used by moderns as identical with the Christian 
body in the third century, is intellectually the 
equivalent of " Christianism " or " Christism " ; 
and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical 
idea : it connotes something historically false ; 
something that never existed. 

Let me give an example of what I mean. 

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in 
a private house in Carthage in the year 225. They 
are all men of culture, all possessed of the two 
languages, Greek and Latin, well read and inter- 
ested in the problems and half-solutions of their 
sceptical time. One will profess himself Materialist, 
and will find another to agree with him ; there is 
no personal God, certain moral duties must be 
recognised by men for such and such Utilitarian 
reasons, and so forth. He finds support. 

The host is not of that opinion ; he has been 
profoundly influenced by certain " mysteries " into 
which he has been "initiated" : that is, symbol- 
ical plays showing the fate of the soul and per- 
formed in high seclusion before members of a 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 71 

society sworn to secrecy. He has come to feel a 
spiritual life as the natural life round him. He has 
curiously followed, and often paid at high expense, 
the services of necromancers; he believes that in 
an "initiation" which he experienced in his youth, 
and during the secret and most vivid drama or 
" mystery " in which he then took part, he actually 
came in contact with the spiritual world. Such men 
were not uncommon. The declining society of the 
time was already turning to influences of that type. 
The host's conviction, his awed and reticent 
attitude towards such things, impress his guests. 
One of the guests, however, a simple, solid kind of 
man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has 
been reading with great interest the literature of 
the Christians. He is in admiration of the 
traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. 
He quotes certain phrases, especially from the four 
orthodox Gospels. They move him to eloquence, 
and their poignancy and illuminative power have 
an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying : 
" For my part, I have come to make it a sort of 
rule to act as this Man Christ would have had me 
act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect 
life I ever read of, and the practical maxims which 
are attached to His Name seem to me a sufficient 
guide to life. That," he will conclude simply, " is 
the groove into which I have fallen, and I do not 
think I shall ever leave it." 



72 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Let us call the man who has so spoken, 
Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have been a Christian 1 * 
Would the officials of the Roman Empire have 
called him a Christian ? Would he have been in 
danger of unpopularity where Christians were 
unpopular ? Would Christians have received him 
among themselves as part of their strict and still 
somewhat secret society ? Would he have counted 
with any single man of the whole empire as one of 
the Christian body ? 

The answer is most emphatically No. 

No Christian in the first three centuries would 
have held such a man as coming within his view ; 
no Imperial officer in the most violent crisis of one 
of these spasmodic persecutions which the Church 
had to undergo would have troubled him with a 
single question. No Christian congregation would 
have regarded him as in any way connected with 
their body. Opinion of that sort, " Christism," 
had no relation to the Church. How far it existed 
we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far 
as it existed it would have been on all fours with 
any one of the vague opinions which floated about 
the cultured Roman world. 

Now it is evident that the term " Christianity " 
used as a point of view, a mere mental attitude, 
would include such a man, and it is equally evident 
that we have only to imagine him to see that he had 
nothing to do with the Christian religion of that 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 73 

day. For the Christian religion (then as now) was 
a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in what I 
have called an organism, and that organism was 
the Catholic Church. 

The reader may here object : " But surely there 
was heresy after heresy and thousands of men were 
at any moment claiming the name of Christian whom 
the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered 
martyrdom rather than relinquish the name." 

True ; but the very existence of such sects 
should be enough to prove the point at issue. 

These sects arose precisely because within the 
Catholic Church (1) exact doctrine, (2) unbroken 
tradition, and (3) absolute unity were, all three, 
regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. 
The heresies arose one after another, from the 
action of men who were prepared to define yet 
more punctiliously what the truth might be, and 
to claim with yet more particular insistence the 
possession of living tradition and the right to be 
regarded as the centre of unity. No heresy 
pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. 
The whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that 
it, the heresy, or he, the heresiarch, was prepared 
to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert his 
own definition. 

What you find in these foundational times is 
not the Catholic Church asserting and defining a 
thing, and then, some time after, the heresiarch 



74 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

denying this definition ; no heresy comes within a 
hundred miles of such a procedure. What happens 
in the early Church is that some doctrine not yet 
fully defined is laid down by such and such a man, 
that his final settlement clashes with the opinion 
of others, that after debate and counsel, and also 
authoritative statement on the part of the bishops, 
this man's solution is rejected and an orthodox 
solution is defined. From that moment the 
heresiarch, if he will not fall into line with defined 
opinion, ceases to be in communion ; and his 
rejection, no less than his own original insistence 
upon his doctrine, are in themselves proofs that 
both he and his judges postulate unity and 
definition as the two necessary marks of Catholic 
truth. 

No early heretic or no early orthodox authority 
dreams of saying to his opponent : " You may be 
right ! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form 
his part of ' Christian society ' and look at things 
from his own point of view." The moment a 
question is raised it must of its nature, the early 
Church being what it was, be defined one way or 
the other. 

Well, then-, what was this body of doctrine held 
by common tradition and present everywhere in 
the first years of the third century ? 

Let me briefly set down what we know, as a 
matter of historical and documentary evidence, the 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 75 

Church of this period to have held. What we 
know is a very different matter from what we can 
guess. We may amplify it from our conceptions 
of the probable according to our knowledge of that 
society — as, for instance, when we say that there 
was probably a bishop at Marseilles before the 
middle of the second century. Or we may amplify 
it by guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of 
evidence, some just possible but exceedingly im- 
probable thing : as, that an important canonical 
Gospel has been lost. There is an infinite range 
for guesswork,, both orthodox and heretical. But 
the plain and known facts which repose upon 
historical and documentary evidence, and which 
have no corresponding documentary evidence 
against them, are both few and certain. 

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set 
down what was certainly true of his time. 

Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 
200. The Church then taught as an unbroken 
tradition that a man who had been put to death 
about 170 years before in Palestine — only 130 
years before Tertullian's birth — had risen again on 
the third day. This man was a known and real 
person with whom numbers had conversed. In 
Tertullian's childhood men still lived who had met 
eye-witnesses of the thing asserted. 

This man (the Church said) was also the 
supreme creating Cod. There you have an 



76 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a 
mystery, fruitful in opportunities for theory, and 
as a fact destined to lead to three centuries of more 
and more particular definition. 

This man, who was also God Himself, had, 
through chosen companions called Apostles, founded 
a strict and disciplined society called the Church. 
The doctrines the Church taught professed to be 
His doctrines. They included the immortality of 
the human soul, its redemption, its alternative of 
salvation and damnation. 

Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism 
with water in the name of The Trinity : Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost. 

Before his death this man who was also God had 
instituted a certain rite and Mystery called the 
Eucharist. He took bread and wine and changed 
them into his Body and Blood. He ordered this 
rite to be continued. The central act of worship 
of the Christian Church was therefore a consecration 
of bread and wine by priests in the presence of the 
initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality. 
The bread and wine so consecrated were certainly 
called (universally) the Body of the Lord. 

The faithful also certainly communicated, that 
is, eat the Bread and drank the Wine thus changed 
in the Mystery. 

It was the central rite of the Church thus to 
take the Body of the Lord. 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 77 

There was certainly at the head of each Christian 
community a bishop : regarded as directly the 
successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of the 
ritual and the guardian of doctrine. 

The whole increasing body of local communities 
kept in touch through their bishops, held one 
doctrine and practised what was substantially one 
ritual. 

All that is plain history. 

The numerical proportion of the Church in the 
city of Carthage, where Tertullian wrote, was 
certainly large enough for its general suppression 
to be impossible. One might argue from one of 
his phrases that it was a tenth of the population. 
Equally certainly did the unity of the Christian 
Church and its bishops teach the institution of the 
Eucharist, the Resurrection, the authority of the 
Apostles, and their power of tradition through the 
bishops. A very large number of converts were to be 
noted, and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority 
of his time, by his testimony, were recruited by 
conversion, and were not born Christians. 

Such is known to have been, in a very brief 
outline, the manner of the Catholic Church in 
these early years of the third century. Such was 
the undisputed manner of the Church as a 
Christian or an enquiring pagan would have been 
acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and 
onwards. 



78 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

I have purposely chosen this moment, because 
it is the moment in which Christian evidence first 
emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of the 
points I have set down are, of course, demonstrably 
anterior to the third century. I mean by " demon- 
strably" anterior, proved in earlier documentary 
testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed 
are long anterior to the time in which you find 
them rooted is obvious to common-sense. But 
there are documents as well. 

Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less 
than sixty years older than Tertullian. He was as 
near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to the 
Eeform Bill, — and he gave us a full description of 
the Mass. 

We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a 
much older man than St. Justin — perhaps forty or 
fifty years older. He stood to the generation 
contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the 
generation of Gladstone, Bismarck, and Manning. 
Early as he is, he testifies fully to the organisation 
of the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic 
Doctrine, and the Primacy in it of the Roman See. 

The literature remaining to us from the first 
century and a half after the Crucifixion is very 
scanty. The writings of what are called 
"Apostolic" times — that is, documents proceeding 
immediately from men who could ; remember the 
time of Our Lord — form not only in their quantity 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 79 

(and that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their 
quality, too, a far superior body of evidence to 
what we possess from the next generation. We 
have more in the New Testament than we have in 
the writings of those men who came just after the 
death of the Apostles. But what does remain is 
quite convincing. There arose from the date of 
Our Lord's ascension into Heaven, from, say, a.d. 
30 or so, before the death of Tiberius, and a long 
lifetime after the Roman organisation of Gaul, 
a definite, strictly ruled, and highly individual 
Society, with fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and 
a strong discipline of its own : with a most vivid 
and distinct personality, unmistakable. And this 
Society was, and is, called " The Church." 

I would beg the reader to note with precision 
both the task upon which we are engaged and the 
exact dates with which we are dealing, for there is 
no matter in which history has been more griev- 
ously distorted by religious bias. 

The task upon which we are engaged is the 
judgement of a portion of history as it was. I am 
not writing here from a brief. I am concerned to 
set forth a fact. I am acting as a witness or a 
copier, not as an advocate or lawyer. And I say 
that the conclusion we can establish with regard 
to the Christian community on these main lines is 
the conclusion to which any man must come quite 
independently of his creed. He will deny these 



80 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

facts only if he has such bias against the Faith as 
interferes with his reason. A man's belief in the 
mission of the Catholic Church, his confidence 
in its divine origin, do not move him to these 
plain historical conclusions any more than they 
move him to his conclusions upon the real 
existence, doctrine, and organisation of contem- 
porary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the 
truth is for Philosophy to discuss. What the 
Church in fact was is plain history. The Church 
may have taught nonsense : its organisation may 
have been a clumsy human thing. That would 
not affect the historical facts. 

By the year 200 the Church was — everywhere, 
manifestly, and on ample evidence throughout the 
Roman world — what I have described, and taught 
the doctrines I have just enumerated : but it 
stretches back 170 years before that date, and it 
has evidence to its title throughout that era of 
growth. 

To see that the state of affairs everywhere and 
widely apparent in a.d. 200 was rooted in the very 
origins of the institution 170 years before, to see 
that all this mass of ritual doctrine and discipline 
start long before the first third of the first century, 
and that the Church was from its birth the Church, 
the reader must consider the dates. 

We know that we have in the body of documents 
contained in the " canon " which the Church has 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 81 

authorised as the "New Testament," documents 
proceeding from men who were contemporaries 
with the origin of the Christian religion. Even 
modern scholarship with all its love of phantasy is 
now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors 
of the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, Clement 
also, and Ignatius also (who had conversed with 
the Apostles), may have been deceived, they may 
have been deceiving. I am not here concerned 
with that point. The discussion of it belongs to 
another province of argument altogether. But 
they were contemporaries of the things they said 
they were contemporaries of. In other words, their 
writings are what is called " authentic." 

If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first 
three) of such and such a miracle, I believe it or I dis- 
believe it. But I am reading the account of a man 
who lived at the time when the miracle is said to have 
happened. If you read (in Ignatius's seven certainly 
genuine letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, 
you may think him a wrong-headed enthusiast. 
But you know that you are reading the work of a 
man who personally witnessed the beginnings of 
the Church ; you know that the customs, manners, 
doctrines, and institutions he mentions or takes for 
granted were certainly those of his time, that is, 
of the origin of Catholicism, though you may think 
the customs silly and the doctrines nonsense. 

St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present 

G 



82 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

character of the Catholic Church is exactly in the 
position — in the matter of dates — of a man of our 
time talking about the rise and present character 
of the Socialists or of the rise and present character 
of Leopold's kingdom of Belgium, of the modern 
United Italy. He is talking of what is, virtually, 
his own time. 

Well, there comes after this considerable body 
of contemporary documentary evidence (evidence 
contemporary, that is, with the very spring and 
rising of the Church and proceeding from its first 
founders) a gap which is somewhat more than the 
long lifetime of a man. 

This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast 
mass of its documentary evidence has, of course, 
perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient writing. 
The little preserved is mainly preserved in quota- 
tions and fragments. But after this gap, from 
somewhat before the year 200, we come to the 
beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing 
in volume, of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, 
of evidence to the truth of supernatural doctrines, 
but of evidence to what these doctrines and their 
accompanying ritual and organisation were : 
evidence to the way in which the Church was con- 
stituted, to the way in which she regarded her 
mission, to the things she thought important, to 
the practice of her rites. 

That is why I have taken the early third century 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 83 

as the moment in which we can first take a full 
historical view of the Catholic Church in being, and 
this picture is full evidence to the state of the 
Church in its origins three generations before. 

I say again, it is all-important for the reader 
who desires a true historical picture to seize the 
sequence of the dates with which we are dealing, 
their relation to the length of human life and there- 
fore to the society to which they relate. 

It is all-important, because the false history 
which has had its own way for so many years is 
based upon two false suggestions of the first 
magnitude. The first is the suggestion that the 
period between the Crucifixion and the full Church 
of the third century was one in which vast changes 
could proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of 
original ideas be rapidly developed ; the second is 
that the space of time during which those changes 
are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to 
account for them. 

It is only because those days are remote from 
ours that such suggestions can be made. If we 
put ourselves by an effort of the imagination into 
the surroundings of that period, we can soon dis- 
cover how false these suggestions are. 

The period was not one favourable to the inter- 
ruption of record. It was one of a very high 
culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual, 
and sceptical men which that society contained was 



84 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

perhaps greater than in any other period with which 
we are acquainted. It was certainly greater than 
it is to-day. Those times were certainly less sus- 
ceptible to mere novel assertion than are the crowds 
of our great cities under the influence of the modern 
press. It was a period astonishingly alive. 
Lethargy and decay had not yet touched the world 
of the Empire. It built, read, travelled, discussed, 
and, above all, criticised, with an enormous energy. 

In general, it was no period during which alien 
fashions could rise within such a community as the 
Church without their opponents being immediately 
able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence 
of the immediate past. The world in which the 
Church arose was one ; and that world was intensely 
vivid. Any one in that world who saw such an 
institution as Episcopacy (for instance) or such a 
doctrine as the Divinity of Christ to be a novel 
corruption of originals could have, and would have, 
protested at once. It was a world of ample record 
and continual communication. 

Granted such a world, let us take the second 
point and see what was the distance in mere time 
between this early third century of which I speak 
and what is called the Apostolic period ; that is, 
the generation which could still remember the 
origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the preach- 
ing of the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps 
African cities. We are often told that changes 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 85 

" gradually crept in " ; that " the imperceptible 
effect of time" did this or that. Let us see how 
these vague phrases stand the test of confrontation 
with actual dates. 

Let us stand in the years 200-210. Consider a 
man then advanced in years, well read, travelled, 
and present in those first years of the third century 
at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were 
many such men who, if they had been able to do 
so, would have reproved novelties and denounced 
perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient 
proof that the main lines of Catholic government 
and practice had developed unbroken and unwarped 
from at least his own childhood. But an old man 
who so witnessed the coustitution of the Church 
and its practices as I have described them in the 
year 200, would correspond to that generation of 
old people whom we have with us to-day : the old 
people who were born in the late twenties and 
thirties of the nineteenth century ; the old people 
who can just remember the English Reform Bill, 
and who were almost grown up during the troubles 
of 1848 and the establishment of the second Empire 
in Paris ; the old people in the United States who 
can remember as children the election of Van Buren 
to the office of president ; the old people whose 
birth was not far removed from the death of Thomas 
Jefferson, and who were grown men and women 
when gold was first discovered in California. 



86 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the 
persecution under Nero. It was the great event 
to which the Christians would refer as a date in 
the early history of the Church. It took place in 
Apostolic times. It affected men who, though 
aged, could easily remember Judaea in the years 
connected with Our Lord's mission and His Passion. 
St. Peter lived to witness, in that persecution, to 
the Faith. St. John survived it. It came not 
forty years later than the day of Pentecost. But 
the persecution under Nero was to an old man such 
as I have supposed assisting at the Eucharist in 
the early part of the third century, no further off 
than the Declaration of Independence is from the 
old people of our generation. An old man in the 
year 200 could certainly remember many who had 
themselves been witnesses of the Apostolic age, 
just as an old man to-day remembers well men who 
saw the French Revolution and the Napoleonic 
war. The old people who had surrounded his child- 
hood would be to St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John 
what the old people who survived, say, to 1845, 
would have been to Jefferson, to Lafayette, or to 
Burke. They could have seen and talked to 
that first generation of the Church as the corre- 
sponding people surviving in the early nineteenth 
century could have seen and talked with the 
founders of the United States. 

It is quite impossible to imagine that the 



THE CHUECH IN THE ROMAN EMPIEE 87 

Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Rite of Initiation (Baptism 
in the name of the Trinity), the establishment of 
an Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and 
orthodoxy, and all those main lines of Catholicism 
which we find to be the very essence of the Church 
in the early third century, could have risen without 
protest. They cannot have come from an innocent, 
natural, uncriticised perversion of an original so very 
recent and so open to every form of examination. 

That there should have been discussion as to the 
definition and meaning of undecided doctrines is 
natural, and fits in both with the dates and 
with the atmosphere of the period and with the 
character of the subject. But that a whole scheme 
of Christian government and doctrine should have 
developed in contradiction of Christian origins and 
yet without protest in a period so brilliantly living, 
full of such rapid intercommunication, and above 
all so brief, is quite impossible. 

That is what history has to say of the early 
Church in the Roman Empire. The Gospels, the 
Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of Clement 
and Ignatius, may tell a true or a false story ; their 
authors may have written under an illusion or 
from a conscious self-deception ; or they may have 
been supremely true and immutably sincere. But 
they are contemporary. A man may respect their 
divine origin or he may despise their claims to 
instruct the human race ; but that the Christian 



88 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

body from its beginning was not " Christianity " 
but a Church, and that that Church was identically 
one with what was already called long before the 
third century 1 the Catholic Church, is simply 
plain history, as plain and straightforward as the 
history, let us say, of municipal institutions in 
contemporary Gaul. It is History indefinitely 
better proved and therefore indefinitely more 
certain than, let us say, modern guesswork in 
imaginary " Teutonic Institutions " before the 
eighth century or the still more imaginary 
" Aryan " origins of the European race, or any 
other of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which 
still try to pass for historical truth. 

So much for the Catholic Church in the early 
third century when first we have a mass of 
evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined, 
powerful growing body, intent on unity, ruled by 
Bishops, having for its central doctrine the In- 
carnation of God in an historical person, Jesus 
Christ, and for its central rite a Mystery, the 
transformation of Bread and Wine by priests 
into the Body and Blood which the faithful 
consume. 

This "State within the State" by the year 
200 already profoundly affected the Empire : in the 
next generation it permeated the Empire. It was 

1 The Muratorian Fragment is older than the third century, and St. 
Ignatius, who also uses the word Catholic, was as near to the Time of the 
Gospels as I am to the Crimean War. 



THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 89 

already transforming European civilisation. By 
the year 300 the thing was done. As the Empire 
declined the Catholic Church caught and pre- 
served it. 

What was the process of that decline ? 

To answer such a question we have next to 
observe three developments that followed : (1) The 
great increase of barbarian hired soldiery within 
the Empire ; (2) the weakening of the central power 
as compared with the local power of the small and 
increasingly rich class of great landowners ; (3) 
the rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted 
official position (and soon a predominating position) 
to complete mastery over all society. 

All these three phenomena developed together ; 
they occupied about two hundred years — roughly 
from the year 300 to the year 500. When they 
had run their course the Western Empire was no 
longer governed as one society from one Imperial 
centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary 
forces in the Roman Army, drawn from barbaric 
recruitment, had established themselves in the 
various provinces and were calling themselves 
" Kings." The Catholic Church was everywhere 
the religion of the great majority ; it had every- 
where alliance with, and often the use of, the 
official machinery of government and taxation 
which continued unbroken. It had become, far 
beyond all other organisms in the Roman State, 



90 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

the central and typical organism which gave the 
European world its note. 

This process is commonly called " The Fall of 
the Roman Empire" ; what was that " fall" ? What 
really happened in this great transformation ? 



Ill 

WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE 
EOMAN EMPIRE? 



91 



Ill 

WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE 
ROMAN EMPIRE ? 

That state of society which I have just described, 
the ordered and united society of the Roman 
Empire, passed into another and very different 
state of society : the society of what are called 
"The Dark Ages." 

From these again arose, after another six hundred 
years of adventures and perils, the great harvest 
of mediaeval civilisation. Hardly had the Roman 
Empire turned in its maturity to accept the fruit 
of its long development (I mean the Catholic 
Church), when it began to grow old and was 
clearly about to suffer some great transition. But 
that transition, which threatened to be death, 
proved in the issue not death at all, but a mixture 
of Vision and Change. 

The close succession of fruit and decay in any 
society is what one must expect from the analogy 
of all living things : at the close of the cycle it is 
death that should come. A plant, just after it is 

93 



94 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

most fruitful, falls quickly. So, one might imagine, 
should the long story of Mediterranean civilisation 
have proceeded. When it was at its final and 
most complete stage, one would expect some final 
and complete religion which should satisfy its long 
search and solve its ancient riddles: but after such 
a discovery, after the fruit of such a maturity had 
fully developed, one would expect an end. 

Now it has been the singular fortune of our 
European civilisation that an end did not come. 
Dissolution was in some strange way checked. 
Death was averted. And the more closely one 
looks into the unique history of that salvation — 
the salvation of all that could be saved in a most 
ancient and fatigued society — the more one sees 
that this salvation was effected by no agency save 
that of the Catholic Church. Everything else, 
after, say, 250 a.d., the empty fashionable philo- 
sophies, the barbarians filling the army, the current 
passions and the current despair, made for nothing 
but ruin. 

There is no parallel to this survival in all the 
history of mankind. Every other great civilisation 
has, after many centuries of development, either 
fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died and 
disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, 
there is nothing left of Assyria. The Eastern 
civilisations remain, but remain immovable ; or if 
they change, can only vulgarly copy external models. 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 95 

But the civilisation of Europe — the civilisation, 
that is, of Rome and of the Empire — had a third 
fortune differing both from death and from sterility : 
it survived to a resurrection. Its essential seeds 
were preserved for a second Spring. 

For five or six hundred years men carved less 
well, wrote verse less well, let roads fall slowly 
into ruin, lost or rather coarsened the machinery 
of government, forgot or neglected much in letters 
and in the arts and in the sciences. But there 
was preserved, right through that long period, 
not only so much of letters and of the arts as 
would suffice to bridge the great gulf between the 
fifth century and the eleventh, but also so much of 
what was really vital in the mind of Europe as 
would permit that mind to blossom again after its 
repose. And the agency, I repeat, which effected 
this conservation of the seeds was the Catholic 
Church. 

It is impossible to understand this truth, indeed 
it is impossible to make any sense at all of 
European history, if we accept that story of the 
decline which is currently put forward in anti- 
Catholic academies, and which has seemed sufficient 
to anti-Catholic historians. 

Their version is, briefly, this : 

The Roman Empire, becoming corrupt and more 
vicious through the spread of luxury and through 
a sort of native weakness to be discovered in the 



96 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

very blood of the Mediterranean, was at last 
invaded and overwhelmed by young and vigorous 
tribes of Germans. These brought with them all 
the strength of those native virtues which later 
rejected the unity of Christendom and began the 
modern Protestant societies — to-day nearly atheist 
and very soon to be wholly so. 

A generic term has been invented by these 
modern and false historians (whose version I am 
here giving) for the process they have imagined. 
The vigorous, young, uncorrupt, and virtuous tribes 
which are imagined to have broken through the 
boundaries of the effete Empire and to have 
rejuvenated it, are grouped together as " Teutonic": 
a German strain, very strong numerically, superior 
also to what was left of Roman civilisation in virile 
power, is said to have come in and to have taken 
over the handling of affairs. One great body of 
these Germans, the Franks, are said to have taken 
over Gaul ; another (the Goths, in their various 
branches), Italy and Spain. But most complete, 
most fruitful, and most satisfactory of all (they tell 
us) was the eruption of these vigorous and healthy 
pagans into the outlying province of Britain, which 
they wholly conquered ; exterminating its original 
inhabitants and colonising it with their superior 
stock. 

" It was inevitable" (the anti-Catholic historian 
proceeds to admit) " that the presence of uncultured 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 97 

though superior men should accelerate the decline 
of arts in the society which they thus conquered. 
It is further to be deplored that their simpler and 
native virtues were contaminated by the arts of 
the Roman Clergy, and that in some measure the 
official religion of Rome captured their noble souls ; 
for that official religion permitted the poison of the 
Roman decline to affect all the European mind — 
even the German mind — for many centuries. But 
at the same time this evil effect was counter- 
balanced by the ineradicable strength and virtues 
of the Northern barbaric blood. This Sacred 
Teutonic Blood it was which brought into Western 
Europe the glamour of romantic stories, the true 
lyric touch in poetry, the deep reverence which was 
(till recently) the note of their religion, the love of 
adventure in which the old civilisation was lacking, 
and a vast respect for women. At the same time 
their warrior spirit evolved the great structure of 
feudalism, the chivalric model, and the whole 
military ideal of mediaeval civilisation. 

"Is it to be wondered at that when great new 
areas of knowledge were opened up in the later 
fifteenth century by suddenly expanded travel, by 
the printing press, and by an unexpected advance 
in physical science, the emancipation of the 
European mind should have brought this pure and 
barbaric stock to its own again ? 

" In proportion as Teutonic blood was strong, 

H 



98 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

in that proportion was the hierarchy of the 
Catholic Church and the hold upon men of 
Catholic tradition shaken in the early sixteenth 
century ; and before that century had closed the 
manly stirp of North Germany, Holland, Scandi- 
navia, and England had developed the Protestant 
civilisation : a society advancing, healthy, and 
already the master of all rivals ; destined soon to 
be, if it be not already, supreme." 

Such is not an exaggerated summary of what 
the anti-Catholic school of history gave us from 
German and from English Universities (with the 
partial aid of anti-Catholic academic forces within 
Catholic countries) during the first two-thirds of 
the nineteenth century. 

There went with this strange way of rewriting 
history a flood of wild hypothesis presented as 
fact. Thus Parliaments (till lately admired) were 
imagined — and therefore stated — to be Teutonic, 
non-Roman, therefore non-Catholic in origin. The 
gradual decline of slavery was attributed to the 
same miraculous powers in the northern pagans ; 
and in general, whatever thing was good in itself 
or was consonant with modern ideas was referred 
back to this original source of good in the business 
of Europe : the German tribes. 

Meanwhile the religious hatred of civilisation 
which filled these false historians, the hatred of 
Roman tradition and of the Church, showed itself 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 99 

in a hundred other ways : the conquest of Spain 
by the Mohammedans was represented by them as 
the victory of a superior people over a degraded 
and contemptible one, the Reconquest of Spain 
by our race over the Asiatics as a disaster ; its 
final triumphal instrument, the Inquisition, which 
saved Spain from a Moorish revenge, was made out 
a monstrosity. Every revolt, however obscure, 
against the unity of European civilisation in the 
Middle Ages (notably the worst revolt of all, the 
Albigensian) was presented as a worthy uplifting 
of the human mind against conditions of bondage. 
Most remarkable of all, the actual daily life of 
Catholic Europe, the habit, way of thought and 
manner of men, during the period of unity — from, 
say, the eighth century to the fifteenth — was 
simply omitted ! 

At the moment when history was struggling to 
become a scientific study this school of self-praising 
fairy tales held the field. When at last history 
did become a true scientific study, this school 
collapsed. But it yet retains, as an inheritance 
from its old hegemony, a singular power in the 
lower and more popular forms of historical writing ; 
and where the English language is spoken it is, 
even to-day, almost the only view of European 
development which the general student can obtain. 

It will be noted at the outset that the whole of 
the fantastic picture which this now discredited 



100 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

theory presented is based upon a certain con- 
ception of what happened at the break-down of the 
Roman Empire. 

Unless these barbaric German tribes did come 
in and administrate, unless they really were very 
considerable in number, unless their character in 
truth was what this school postulated it to be — 
vigorous, young, virtuous, and all the rest of it — 
unless there did indeed take place a struggle 
between this imaginary great German nation 
and the Mediterranean civilisation, in which the 
former won and ruled as conquerors over subject 
peoples ; unless these primary axioms have some 
historical truth in them, the theory which is 
deduced from them has no historical value what- 
soever. 

A man may have a preference, as a Protestant 
or merely as an inhabitant of North Germany or 
Scandinavia, for the type of man who originally 
lived his degraded life outside the Roman Empire. 
He may, as an anti-Catholic of any kind, hope that 
civilisation was decadent through Catholicism at 
the end of the united Roman Empire, and it may 
please him to imagine that the coincidence of what 
was originally barbaric with what is now Protestant 
German Europe is a proof of the former's original 
prowess. Nay, he may even desire that the non- 
Catholic and non-traditional type in our civilisation 
shall attain to a supremacy which it certainly has 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 101 

not yet reached. 1 But the whole thing is only a 
pleasant (or unpleasant) dream, something to 
imagine and not something to discover, unless we 
have a solid historical foundation for the theory ; 
to wit, the destruction of the Roman Empire in 
the way which, and by the men whom, the theory 
presupposes. 

The validity of the whole scheme depends upon 
our answer to the question, " What was the fall of 
the Roman Empire ? " 

If it was a conquest, such as we have just seen 
postulated, and a conquest actuated by the motives 
of men so described, then this old anti-Catholic 
School, though it could not maintain its exaggera- 
tions (though, for instance, it could not connect 
representative institutions with the German bar- 
barians), would yet be substantially true. 

Now the moment documents began to be 
seriously examined and compared, the moment 
modern research began to approach some sort of 
finality in the study of that period wherein the 
United Roman Empire of the West was replaced by 
sundry local Kingdoms, students of history thence- 
forward (and in proportion to their impartiality) 
became more and more convinced that the whole 
of this anti- Catholic attitude reposed upon nothing 
more than assertion. 

1 I wrote that phrase before the break-up of Prussia and at a moment 
when Prussia was still the Idol of Oxford. 



102 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

There was no conquest of effete Mediterranean 
peoples by vigorous barbarians. The vast number 
of barbarians who lived as slaves within the Empire, 
the far smaller number who were pressed or hired 
into the military service of the Empire, the still 
smaller number which entered the Empire as 
marauders during the weakness of the Central 
Government towards its end, were not of the sort 
which this anti- Catholic theory, mistaking its 
desires for realities, presupposed. 

The barbarians were not "Germans" (a term 
difficult to define), they were of very mixed stocks 
which, if we go by speech (a bad guide to race), 
were some of them Germanic, some Slav, some even 
Mongol, some Berber, some of the old unnamed 
races — the Picts, for instance, and the dark men of 
the extreme north and west. 

They had no conspicuous respect for women 
of the sort which should produce the chivalric 
ideal. 

They were not free societies but slave-owning 
societies. 

They did not desire, attempt, or even dream 
the destruction of the Imperial power : that mis- 
fortune — which was gradual and never complete — 
in so far as it came about at all, came about in 
spite of the barbarians and not by their conscious 
efforts. 

They were not numerous ; on the contrary they 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 103 

were but handfuls of men, even when they appeared 
as successful pillagers and raiders over the frontiers. 
When they came in large numbers they were wiped 
out. 

They did not introduce any new institutions or 
any new ideas. 

Again, you do not find, in that capital change 
from the old civilisation to the Dark Ages, that 
the rise of legend and of the romantic and ad- 
venturous spirit (the sowing of the modern seed) 
coincides with places where the great mass of bar- 
baric slaves are settled, or where the fewer barbaric 
pillagers or the regular barbaric soldiers in the 
Roman Army pass. Romance appears hundreds of 
years later, and it appears more immediately and 
earliest in connection with precisely those districts 
in which the passage of the few Teutonic, Slavonic, 
and other barbarians had been least felt. 

There is no link between barbaric society and 
the feudalism of the Middle Ages ; there is no trace 
of such a link. There is, on the contrary, a very 
definite and clearly marked historical sequence 
between Roman civilisation and the feudal system, 
attested by innumerable documents which, once 
read and compared in their order, leave no sort 
of doubt that feudalism and the mediaeval civilisa- 
tion repose on purely Roman origins. 

In a word, the gradual cessation of central 
Imperial rule in Western Europe, the failure of the 



104 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

power and habit of one united organisation, seated 
in Rome, to colour, define, and administrate the 
lives of men, was an internal revolution ; it did not 
come from without. It was a change from within : 
it was nothing remotely resembling an external, 
still less a barbaric, conquest. 

All that happened was that Roman civilisation, 
having grown very old, failed to maintain that 
vigorous and universal method of local government, 
subordinated to the capital, which it had for four 
or five hundred years supported. The machinery 
of taxation gradually weakened ; the whole of 
central bureaucratic action weakened ; the greater 
men in each locality began to acquire a sort of in- 
dependence ; and sundry soldiers benefited by the 
slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local 
" palaces," as they were called, of Roman adminis- 
tration, secured such revenues as the remains of 
Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, 
had thrust upon them so much of the duty of 
government as the decline of civilisation could still 
maintain. 

That is what happened, and that is all that 
happened. 

As an historical phenomenon it is what I have 
called it — enormous. It most vividly struck the 
imaginations of men. The tremors and the 
occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms 
of this change of base from the old high civilisation 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 105 

to the Dark Ages singularly impressed the numer- 
ous and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors, 
their astonishment, their speculations as to the 
result, have come down to us highly emphasised. 
We feel after all those centuries the shock which 
was produced on the literary world of the day by 
Alaric's sack of Rome, or by the march of the 
Roman Auxiliary troops called " Visigoth " through 
Gaul into Spain, or by the appearance of the mixed 
horde called — after their leaders — " Vandals " in 
front of Hippo in Africa. But what we do not 
feel, what we do not obtain from the contemporary 
documents, what was a mere figment of the academic 
brain in the generation now just passing away, is 
that anti-Catholic and anti-civilised bias which 
would represent the ancient civilisation as con- 
quered by men of another and of a better stock who 
have since developed the supreme type of modern 
civilisation, and whose contrast with the Catholic 
world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded 
as the principle of life in Europe and emphasised 
as the fundamental fact in European history. 

The reader will not be content with a mere 
affirmation of historic truth, though the affirmation 
is based upon all that is worth counting in modern 
scholarship. 

He will ask, What, then, did really happen ? 
After all, Alaric did sack Rome. The Kings of the 
Franks were Belgian chieftains, probably speaking 



106 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

(at first) Flemish as well as Latin. Those of the 
Burgundians were probably men who spoke that 
hotchpotch of original Barbaric, Celtic, and Roman 
words later called " Teutonic dialects," as well as 
Latin. The military officers called (from the 
original recruitment of their commands) " Goths," 
both eastern and western, were in the same case. 
Even that mixed mass of Slav, Berber, escaped 
slaves, and the rest which, from original leaders, 
was called in North Africa " Vandal," probably had 
some considerable German nucleus. 

The false history has got superficial ground to 
work upon. Many families whose origins came 
from what is now German-speaking Central Europe 
ruled in local government during the transition, 
and distinct though small tribes, mainly German 
in speech, survived for a short time in the Empire. 
Like all falsehood, the falsehood of the " Teutonic 
theory " could not live without an element of truth 
to distort, and it is the business of any one who is 
writing true history, even in so short an essay as 
this, to show what that ground was and how it 
has been misrepresented. 

In order to understand what happened we must 
first of all clearly represent to ourselves the fact 
that the structure upon which our united civilisa- 
tion had in its first five centuries reposed was 
the Roman Army. By which I do not mean that 
the number of soldiers was very large compared 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 107 

with the civilian population, but that the organ 
which was vital in the State, the thing that really 
counted, the institution upon which men's minds 
turned, and which they thought of as the founda- 
tion of all, was the military institution. 

The original city-state of the Mediterranean 
broke down, a little before the beginning of our 
era. 

When (as always ultimately happens in a 
complex civilisation of many millions) self-govern- 
ment had broken down, and when it was necessary, 
after the desperate faction fights which that break- 
down had produced, to establish a strong centre of 
authority, the obvious and, as it were, necessary 
person to exercise that authority (in a State 
constituted as was the Roman State) was the 
Commander-in-Chief of the Army ; all that the 
word "Emperor" — the Latin word Imperator — 
means is a commander-in-chief. 

It was the Army which made and unmade 
Emperors ; it was the Army which designed and 
ordered and even helped to construct the great 
roads of the Empire. It was in connection with 
the needs of the Army that those roads were traced. 
It was the Army which secured (very easily, for 
peace was popular) the civil order of the vast 
organism. It was the Army especially which 
guarded its frontiers against the uncivilised world 
without — upon the edge of the Sahara and of the 



108 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Arabian desert ; upon the edge of the Scotch 
mountains ; upon the edge of the poor, wild lands 
between Rhine and Elbe. On those frontiers the 
garrisons made a sort of wall within which wealth 
and right living could accumulate, outside which 
small and impoverished bodies of men destitute of 
the arts (notably of writing), save in so far as they 
rudely copied the Romans or were permeated by 
adventurous Roman commerce, lived under con- 
ditions which, in the Celtic hills, we can partially 
appreciate from the analogy of ancient Gaul and 
from tenacious legends, but of which in the German 
and Slavonic sand-plains, marshes, and woods, we 
know hardly anything at all. 

Now this main instrument, the Roman Army — 
the instrument, remember, which not only preserved 
civil functions but actually created the master of 
all civic functions, the Government, — went through 
three very clear stages of change in the first four 
centuries of the Christian era — up to the year a.d. 
400 or so. And it is the transformation of the 
Roman Army during the first four centuries which 
explains the otherwise inexplicable change in 
society just afterwards, in the fifth and sixth 
centuries — that is from 400 to 600 a.d : the turn 
from the full civilisation of Rome to the beginning 
of the Dark Ages. 

In its first stage, during the early Empire, just 
as the Catholic Church was founded and was 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 109 

beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still 
theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. 1 

As a matter of fact, the Army was already 
principally professional, and it was being recruited 
even in this first stage very largely from the 
territories Rome had conquered. 

Thus we have Caesar raising a Gallic legion 
almost contemporaneously with his conquest of Gaul. 
But for a long time after, well into the Christian 
era, the Army was conceived of in men's minds as a 
sort of universal institution rooted in the citizenship 
which men were still proud to claim throughout 
the Empire, and which belonged only to a minority 
of its inhabitants ; for the majority were slaves. 

In the second phase (which corresponded with 
the beginning of a decline in letters and in the 
arts, which carries us through the welter of civil 
wars in the third century, and which introduces the 
remodelled Empire at their close) the Army was 
becoming purely professional and at the same time 
drawn from whatever was least fortunate in Roman 
society. The recruitment of it was treated much 
after the fashion of a tax ; the great landed 
proprietors (who, by a parallel development in the 
decline, were becoming the chief economic feature 

1 A soldier was still technically a citizen up to the very end. The 
conception of a soldier as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his 
being a slave, was in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the 
soldiers were almost entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from 
slave stock, the soldiers themselves were free citizens always. 



110 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

in the Roman State) were summoned to send a 
certain number of recruits from their estates. 

Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as 
were the conditions of military service, it gave them 
civic freedom, certain honours, a certain pay, and a 
future for their children. The poorer freed men 
would also go at the command of their lord (though 
only of course a certain proportion — for the con- 
scription was very light compared with modern 
systems, and was made lighter by re-enlistment, long 
service, absence of reserves, and the use of veterans). 

During this second stage, while the Army was 
becoming less and less civic, and more and more a 
profession for the destitute and the unfortunate, 
the unpopularity and the ignorance of military 
service among the rest of the population was 
increasing. The average citizen grew more and 
more divorced from the Army and knew less and 
less of its conditions. He came to regard it partly as 
a necessary police force or defence of his frontiers, 
partly as a nuisance to him at home. He also 
came to regard it as something with which he had 
nothing to do. It lived a life separate from himself. 
It governed (through the power of the Emperor, 
its chief) ; it depended on, and also supported 
or remade, the Imperial Court. But it was ex- 
ternal, at the close of the Empire, to general society. 

Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, 
and the habit grew up of offering the hungry tribes 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 111 

outside the pale of the Empire the advantage of 
residence within it on condition that they should 
serve as Roman soldiers. 

The conception of territories within the Empire 
which were affiliated and allied to it rather than 
absorbed by it was a very ancient one. That con- 
ception had lost reality so far as the old territories 
it had once affected were concerned ; but it paved 
the way for the parallel idea of troops affiliated and 
allied to the Roman Army, part of that army in 
discipline and organisation, yet possessed of con- 
siderable freedom within their own divisions. 

Here we have not only a constant and increasing 
use of barbaric troops drafted into the regular corps, 
but also whole bodies which were more and more 
frequently accepted " en bloc," and under their 
local leaders, as auxiliaries to the Roman forces. 

Some such bodies appear to have been settled 
upon land on the frontiers, to others were given 
similar grants at very great distances from the 
frontiers. Thus we have a small body of German 
barbarians settled at Eennes in Brittany. And, 
again, within the legions (who were all technically 
of Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from 
the full civilisation of Rome) the barbarian who 
happened to find himself within that civilisation 
tended more than did his non -barbarian fellow- 
citizen (or fellow-slave) to accept military service. 
He would nearly always be poorer ; he would, 



112 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

unless his experience of civilisation was a long one, 
feel the hardship of military service less ; and in 
this second phase, while the Army was becoming 
more sedentary (more attached, that is, to particular 
garrisons), more permanent, more of an hereditary 
thing handed on from father to son, and dis- 
tinguished by the large element of what we call 
" married quarters," it was also becoming more and 
more an army of men who, whether as auxiliaries 
or as true Roman soldiers, were in blood, descent, 
and to some extent in manners but less in 
language, barbarians. There were negroes, there 
were probably Celts, there were Slavs, Mongols of 
the Steppes, more numerous Germans, and so forth. 

In the third stage, which is the stage that saw 
the great convulsion of the fifth century, the Army, 
though not yet wholly barbaric, had already become 
in its most vital part barbaric. It took its orders, 
of course, wholly from the Roman State, but great 
groups within it were only partly Latin-speaking 
or Greek-speaking, and we're certainly regarded 
both by themselves and by their Roman masters 
as non-Roman in manners and in blood. 

It must most clearly be emphasised that not 
only no such thought as an attack upon the Empire 
entered the heads of these soldiers, but that the 
very idea of it would have been inconceivable to 
them. Had you proposed it they would not even 
have known what you meant. That a particular 



THE "FALL" OF THE EOMAN EMPIRE 113 

section of the Army should fight against a particular 
claimant to the Empire (and therefore and neces- 
sarily in favour of some other claimant) they 
thought natural enough ; but to talk of an attack 
upon the Empire itself would have seemed to them 
like talking of an attack upon bread and meat, air, 
water, and fire. The Empire was the whole method 
and meaning of their lives. 

At intervals the high and wealthy civilisation 
of the Roman Empire was, of course, subjected to 
attempted pillage by small and hungry robber 
bands without its boundaries, but that had nothing 
to do with the barbaric recruitment of the Roman 
Army save when such bands were caught and 
incorporated. The Army was always ready at a 
moment's order to cut such foreign raiders to pieces 
— and always did so successfully. 

The portion of the Army chosen to repel, cut 
up, and sell into slavery a marauding band of Slavs 
or Germans or Celts, always had Celts or Slavs or 
Germans present in targe numbers among its own 
soldiery. But no tie of blood interfered with the 
business. To consider such a thing would have 
been inconceivable to the opponents on either side. 
The distinction was not between speech and speech, 
still less between racial customs. It was a dis- 
tinction between the Imperial Service on the one 
side, against the outer, unrecognised savage on the 
other. 

I 



114 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

As the machinery of Government grew weak 
through old age, and as the recruitment of the 
Army from barbarians and the large proportion of 
auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis 
of the whole State, the tendency of pillaging bands 
to break in past the frontiers, into the cultivated 
lands and the wealth of the cities, grew greater and 
greater ; but it never occurred to them to attack 
the Empire as such. All they wanted was per- 
mission to enjoy the life which was led within it, 
and to abandon the wretched conditions to which 
they were compelled outside its boundaries. 

Sometimes they were transformed from pillagers 
to soldiers by an offer extended by the Roman 
authorities ; more often they snatched a raid when 
there was for the moment no good garrison in their 
neighbourhood. Then a Roman force would march 
against them, and if they were not quick at getting 
away would cut them to pieces. But with the 
progress of the central decline the attacks of these 
small bands on the frontiers became more frequent. 
Frontier towns came to regard such attacks as a 
permanent peril and to defend themselves against 
them. Little groups of raiders would sometimes 
traverse great districts from end to end, and whether 
in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bauds 
on land, the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot 
(but principally to enjoy) the conditions that 
civilisation offered grew more and more persistent. 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 115 

It must not be imagined, of course, that civilisa- 
tion had not occasionally to suffer then, as it had 
had to suffer at intervals for a thousand years past, 
the attacks of really large and organised barbaric 
armies. 1 Thus in the year 406, driven by the pres- 
sure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, 
a vast barbaric host under one Radagaisus pushed 
into Italy. The men bearing arms alone were 
estimated (in a time well used to soldiery and to 
such estimates) at 200,000. 

But those 200,000 were wiped out. The 
barbarians were always wiped out when they 
attempted to come as conquerors. Stilicho (a 
typical figure, for he was himself of barbarian 
descent, yet in the regular Roman service) cut to 
pieces one portion of them, the rest surrendered 
and were sold off and scattered as slaves. 

Immediately afterwards you have a violent 
quarrel between various soldiers who desire to 
capture the Imperial power. The story is frag- 
mentary and somewhat confused — now one usurper 
is blamed, and now another ; but the fact common 
to all is that with the direct object of usurping 
power a Roman General calls in barbarian bands of 
pillagers (all sorts of small groups — Franks, 
Suevians, Vandals) to cross the Rhine into Gaul, 

1 For instance, a century and a half before the breakdown of central 
Government, the Goths, a barbaric group largely German, had broken 
in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their successors in the fifth 
century. 



116 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

not as barbarian " conquerors" but as allies, to help 
in a civil war. 

The succeeding generation has left us ample 
evidence of the results. It presents us with docu- 
ments that do not give a picture of a ruined 
province by any means : only of a province which 
has been traversed in certain directions by the 
march of barbarian robber bands, who afterwards 
disappeared, largely in fighting among themselves. 

We have, later, the very much more serious 
business of the Mongol Attila and his Huns, 
leading the great outer mass of Germans and 
Slavs into the Empire on an enormous raid. In 
the middle of the fifth century, fifty years after 
the destruction of Radagaisus, these Asiatics, 
leading more numerous other barbaric dependents 
of theirs from the Germanies and the eastern 
Slavonic lands, penetrated for two brief moments 
into northern Italy and eastern Gaul. The end of 
that business — infinitely graver though it was than 
the raids that came before it — is just what one 
might have expected. The regular and auxiliary 
disciplined forces of the Empire destroy the 
barbarian power near Chalons, and the last and 
worst of the invasions is wiped out as thoroughly 
as had been all the others. 

In general, the barbaric irruptions into the 
Empire failed wholly as soon as Imperial troops 
could be brought up to oppose them. 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 117 

What, then, were the supposed barbaric 
successes ? What was the real nature of the action 
of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome ? and 
how, later, do we find local " kings " in the place 
of the Roman Governors ? 

The real nature of the action of men like 
Alaric is utterly different from the imaginary 
picture with which picturesque popular history 
recently provided us. That false history gives us 
the impression of a barbarian Chieftain gathering 
his Clan to a victorious assault on Rome. Consider 
the truth upon Alaric and contrast it with this 
imaginary picture. 

Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but 
from birth a Roman ; at eighteen years of age he 
was put by the Imperial Court in command of a 
small Roman auxiliary force originally recruited 
from the Goths. He was as much a Roman 
officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any 
other terms than those of the Roman Army, as 
any other one of his colleagues about the throne. 
He had his commission from the Emperor Theo- 
dosius, and when Theodosius marched into Gaul 
against the usurper Eugenius, he counted Alaric's 
division as among the most faithful of his Army. 

It so happened, moreover, that these few 
original auxiliaries — mainly Goths by race — were 
nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric 
survived. The remnant of his division was 



118 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

recruited — we know not how, but probably from all 
kinds of sources — to its old strength. It was still 
called "Gothic" though now of the most mixed 
origin, and it was still commanded by himself in 
his character of a Roman General. 

Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was 
rewarded by further military dignities in the 
Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of 
military titles and of important command, as are 
all soldiers. 

Though still under twenty years of age and 
only a commander of auxiliaries, he asks for the 
title of Magister Militum, with the dignity which 
accompanied that highest of military posts. The 
Emperor refuses it. One of the Ministers there- 
upon begins to plot with Alaric and suggests to 
him that he might gather other auxiliary troops 
under his command, and make things uncomfort- 
able for his superiors. Alaric rebels, marches 
through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and 
Greece, and down into the Peloponnesus ; the 
regulars march against him (according to some 
accounts) and beat him back into Albania. 

There ends his first adventure. It is exactly 
like that of a hundred other Roman generals in 
the past, and so are his further adventures. He 
remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and 
makes, peace with the Government — still enjoying 
a regular commission from the Emperor. 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 119 

He Dext tries a new adventure to serve his 
ambition in Italy, but his Army is broken to pieces 
at Pollentia by the armies in Italy — under a 
general, by the way, as barbaric in mere descent 
as was Alaric, but, like Alaric, wholly Roman in 
training and ideas. 

The whole thing is a civil war between various 
branches of the Roman service, and is motived, 
like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of years 
before, by the ambitions of generals. 

Alaric does not lose his commission even after his 
second adventure. He begins to intrigue between 
the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman 
Empire. The great invasion under Radagaisus 
interrupts this civil war. That invasion was for 
Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman officer, 
an invasion of barbaric enemies. That these 
enemies should be called by this or that barbaric 
name is quite indifferent to him. They come from 
outside the Empire, and are therefore, in his eyes, 
cattle. He helps to destroy them, and destroyed 
they are — promptly and thoroughly. 

When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had 
the opportunity to renew the civil wars within the 
Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay that 
were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general 
(himself, by the way, a Vandal in descent), admitted 
Alaric's right to arrears of pay, but just at that 
moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue 



120 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

which was based, like all the real movements of 
the time, on differences of religion, not of race. 
Stilicho, suspected of attempting to restore 
paganism, is killed. In the general confusion 
certain of the families of the auxiliaries garrisoned 
in Italy are massacred by the non-military popula- 
tion. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion 
against the Imperial authority, these auxiliaries 
join him. 

The total number of Alaric' s men was at this 
moment very small ; they were perhaps 30,000. 
There was no trace of nationality about them. 
They were simply a body of discontented soldiers ; 
they had not come from across the frontier ; they 
were not invaders ; they were part of the long- 
established and regular garrisons of the Empire ; 
and, for that matter, many garrisons and troops 
of equally barbaric origin sided with the regular 
authorities in the quarrel. Alaric marches on 
Rome with this disaffected Roman Army, claiming 
that he has been defrauded of his due in salary, 
and leaning upon the popularity of the dead 
Stilicho, w T hose murder he says he will avenge. 
His thirty thousand claim the barbarian slaves 
within the city, and certain sums of money which 
had been the pretext and motive of his rebellion. 

As a result of this action the Emperor promises 
Alaric his regular salary as a general, and a district 
which he may not only command but plant with 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 121 

his few followers. Even in the height of his 
success, Alaric again demands the thing which 
was nearest his heart, the supreme and entirely 
Roman title of Magister Militum, the highest post 
in the hierarchy of military advancement. But 
the Emperor again refuses to give that. Alaric 
again marches on Rome, a Roman officer followed 
by a rebellious Roman Army. He forces the 
Senate to make Attalus nominal Emperor of the 
West, and Attalus to give him the desired title, 
his very craving for which is most significant of 
the Roman character of the whole business. 
Alaric then quarrels with his puppet, deprives him 
of the insignia of the Empire, and sends them to 
Honorius ; quarrels again with Honorius, re-enters 
Rome and pillages it, marches to southern Italy, 
dies, and his small Army is dismembered. 

There is the story of Alaric as it appears from 
documents, and as it was in reality. There is the 
truth underlying the false picture with which most 
educated men were recently provided by the 
anti-Roman bias of recent history. 

Certainly the story of Alaric's discontent with 
his salary and the terms of his commission, his 
raiding marches, his plunder of the capital, shows 
how vastly different was the beginning of the 
fifth century from the society of three hundred 
years before. It is symptomatic of the change, 
and it could only have been possible at a moment 



122 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

when central government was at last breaking 
down. But it is utterly different in motive and_ 
in social character from the vague customary 
conception of a vast barbarian " invasion," led by 
a German " war lord," pouring over the Alps and 
taking Roman society and its capital by storm. 
It has no relation to such a picture. 

If all this be true of the dramatic adventure 
of Alaric, which has so profoundly affected the 
imagination of mankind, it is still truer of the 
other contemporary events which false history 
might twist into a "conquest" of the Empire 
by the barbarian. 

There was no such conquest. All that happened 
was an internal transformation of Roman society, 
in which the chief functions of local government 
fell to the heads of local auxiliary forces in the 
Roman Army. As these auxiliary forces were now 
mainly barbaric, so were the personalities of the 
new local governors. 

I have only dealt with the particular case of 
Alaric because it is the most familiar and the most 
generally distorted : a test, as it were, of my theme. 

But what is true of him is true of all other 
auxiliaries in the Armies — even of the probably 
Slavonic Vandals. These did frankly loot a 
province — North Africa — and they (and they alone 
of the auxiliary troops) did revolt against the 
Imperial system and defy it for a century ; but 



THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIEE 123 

the Vandals themselves were already, before their 
adventure, a part of the Imperial forces ; they 
were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up of 
all the varied elements of rebellion present in the 
country ; and their experiment in separation went 
down at last for ever before the Imperial Armies. 
Meanwhile the North African society on which 
the rebels lived, and which, with their various 
recruits — Moors, escaped slaves, criminals — they 
maladministered and half ruined, was and remained 
Roman. 

In the case of local Italian government the case 
is quite clear. There was never any question of 
" invasion " or " conquest." 

Odoacer held a regular Roman commission ; he 
was a Roman soldier. Theodoric supplanted him 
by leave of, and actually under orders from, the 
Emperor. The last and greatest example, the 
most permanent, Gaul, tells the same story. The 
Burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted 
after imploring the aid of the Empire and per- 
mission to settle. Clovis, the Belgian Fleming, 
fights no Imperial Army. His forbears were 
Roman officials ; his little band of perhaps 8000 
men was victorious in a small and private civil 
war which made him Master in the North over 
other rival generals. He defended the Empire 
against the Eastern barbaric German tribes. He 
rejoiced in the titles of Consul and Patrician. 



124 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

There was no destruction of Roman society ; 
there was no breach of continuity in the main 
institutions of what was now the Western Christian 
world ; there was no considerable admixture (in 
these local civil wars) of German, Slav, or outer 
Celtic blood — no appreciable addition at least to 
the large amount of such blood which, through 
the numerous soldiers and much more numerous 
slaves, had already been incorporated with the 
population of the Roman world. 

But in the course of this transformation in the 
fifth and sixth centuries local government did fall 
into the hands of those who happened to command 
the main local forces of the Roman Army, and 
these were by descent barbarian because the Army 
had become barbarian in its recruitment. 

Why local government gradually succeeded the 
old centralised Imperial Government, and how, 
in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern 
nations, we will next examine. 



IV 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 



125 



IV 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 

European civilisation, which the Catholic Church 
has made and makes, is by that influence still one. 
Its unity now (as for three hundred years past) 
is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of 
the Reformation. The earlier wounds have been 
healed ; that modern wound we hope may still be 
healed — we hope so, because the alternative is 
death. At any rate unity, wounded or un wounded, 
is still the mark of Christendom. 

That unity to-day falls into national groups. 
Those of the West in particular are highly dif- 
ferentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call it) 
is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish 
Peninsula (though divided into five particular, 
three main regions, each with its language, of 
which one, Portugal, is politically independent 
of the rest) is another. The old European and 
Roman district of North Africa is but partially 
reoccupied by European civilisation. Italy has 
quite recently appeared as another united national 

127 v 



128 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

group. The Roman province of England has 
(south of the border) formed one united nation 
for a longer period than any of the others. To 
England, Scotland has been added. 

How did these modern nations arise in the 
transformation of the Roman Empire from its old 
simple pagan condition to one complex Christian 
civilisation ? How came there to be also nations 
exterior to the Empire : old nations like Ireland, 
new nations like Poland ? We must be able to 
answer this question if we are to understand not 
only that European civilisation has been con- 
tinuous (that is, one in time as well as one in 
spirit and in place), but also if we are to know 
why and how that continuity was preserved. For 
one we are and will be, all Europeans. The 
moment something threatens our common morals 
from within we face it, however tardily. We 
have forgotten what it is to feel a threat from 
without ; but it may come. 

We are already familiar with the old popular 
and false explanation of the rise of the European 
nations. This explanation tells us that great 
numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman 
Empire, conquered it, established themselves as 
masters, and parcelled out its various provinces. 

We have seen that such a picture is fantastic, 
and, when it is accepted, destroys a man's historic 
sense of Europe. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 129 

We have seen that the barbarians who burst 
through the defences of civilisation at various 
times (from before the beginnings of recorded 
history ; through the pagan period prefacing our 
Lord's birth ; during the height of the Empire 
proper, in the third century ; again in the fourth 
and the fifth) never had the power to affect that 
civilisation seriously, and therefore were invariably 
conquered and easily absorbed. It was in the 
natural course of things this should be so. 

I say " in the natural course of things." Dread- 
ful as the irruption of barbarians into civilised 
places must always be, even on a small scale, the 
conquest of civilisation by barbarians is always and 
necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the 
weight to destroy the civilisation they enter, and 
in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it 
is inconceivable that they should impose their view 
and manner upon civilised men. Now to impose 
one's view and manner, dare leges (to give laws), 
is to conquer. 

Moreover, save under the most exceptional con- 
ditions, a civilised army with its training, discipline, 
and scientific traditions of war can always ulti- 
mately have the better of a horde. In the case of 
the Eoman Empire the armies of civilisation did, 
as a fact, always have the better of the barbarian 
hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians a 
hundred years before our Lord was born, though 

K 



130, EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

their horde was not broken until it had suffered 
the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred years later 
the Roman armies had the better of another similar 
horde of barbarians, the host of Radagaisus, in their 
rush upon Italy ; and here again the vast multitude 
lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery. We 
have seen how the Roman Generals, Alaric and 
the others, destroyed them. 

But we have also seen that within the Roman 
Army itself certain auxiliary troops (which may 
have preserved to some slight extent traces of their 
original tribal character, and probably preserved 
for a generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, 
camp slang, and the original barbaric tongues) 
assumed greater and greater importance in the 
Roman Army towards the end of the Imperial 
period — that is, towards the end of the fourth and 
in the beginning of the fifth centuries (say 350- 
450). 

We have seen why these auxiliary forces con- 
tinued to increase in importance within the Roman 
Army, and we have seen how it was only as Roman 
soldiers and as part of the regular forces of civilisa- 
tion that they had that importance, or that their 
officers and generals, acting as Romayi officers and 
generals, could play the part they did. 

The heads of these auxiliary forces were invari- 
ably men trained as Romans. They knew of no 
life save that civilised life which the Empire 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 131 

enjoyed. They regarded themselves as soldiers and 
politicians of the State in which — not against 
which — they warred. They acted wholly within 
the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries 
had no memory or tradition of a barbaric life beyond 
the Empire, though their stock in some part sprang 
from it ; they had no liking for barbarism, and 
no living communication with it. The auxiliary 
soldiers and their Generals lived and thought 
entirely within those Imperial boundaries which 
guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architect- 
ure, great and populous cities, the vine, the olive, 
the Roman law and the bishoprics of the Catholic 
Church. Outside was a wilderness with which 
they had nothing to do. 

Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end 
to any fantastic theory of barbarian " conquest " ), 
let us set out to explain that state of affairs which 
a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of 
the mere raids into the Empire was destroyed under 
Radagaisus, would have observed in middle age. 

Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of 
Clermont-Ferrand, lived and wrote his classical 
stuff at such a date after Alaric's Roman adventure 
and Radagaisus' defeat that the life of a man would 
span the distance between them ; it was a matter 
of nearly seventy years between those events and 
his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond 
to such a spectator as we are imagining ; a grandson 



132 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of that generation might be born before the year 
500. Such a man would have stood towards 
Radagaisus' raid, the last futile irruption of the 
barbarian, much as men, old to-day in England, 
stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War, 
to the Second Napoleon in France, to the Civil 
War in the United States. Had a grandson of 
Sidonius travelled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in his 
later years, this is what he would have seen : 

In all the great towns Roman life was going on 
as it had always gone on, so far as externals were 
concerned. The same Latin speech, now somewhat 
degraded, the same dress, the same division into a 
minority of free men, a majority of slaves, and a 
few very rich masters round whom not only the 
slaves but the mass of the free men also were 
grouped as dependants. 

In every city, again, he would have found a 
Bishop of the Catholic Church, a member of that 
hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and head- 
ship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and 
especially the settlement of divisions and doubts 
in religion, would have been the main popular pre- 
occupation. And everywhere save in Northern 
Gaul he would have perceived small groups of men, 
wealthy, connected with government, often bearing 
barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still partly 
acquainted with barbaric tongues. 

Now these few men were, as a rule, of a special 






THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 133 

sect in religion. They were called Avians ; heretics 
who differed in religion from the mass of their 
fellow - citizens very much as the minority of 
Protestants in an Irish county to-day differ from 
the great mass of their Catholic fellows ; and that 
was a point of capital importance. 

The little provincial courts were headed by men 
who, though Christian (with the Mass, the Sacra- 
ments, and all Christian things), were yet out of 
communion with the bulk of their officials and all 
their tax-payers. They had inherited that odd 
position from an accident in the Imperial History. 
At the moment when their grandfathers had received 
baptism the Imperial Court had accepted this 
heresy. They had come, therefore, by family 
tradition to regard their separate sect (with its 
attempt to rationalise the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion) as a " swagger." They thought it an odd 
title to eminence. And this little vanity had two 
effects. It cut them off from the mass of their 
fellow-citizens in the Empire. It made their tenure 
of power uncertain and destined to disappear very 
soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the 
great Catholic body — the troops led by the local 
governors of Northern France. 

We shall return to this matter of Arianism. 
But first let us follow the state of society as our 
supposed grandson of Sidonius would have seen it 
at the beginning of the Dark Ages. 



134 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The armed forces lie might have met upon the 
roads as he travelled would have been rare ; their 
accoutrements, their discipline, their words of 
command, were still, though in a degraded form, 
those of the old Roman Army. There had been 
no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its 
corporate life. Many of the bodies he met would 
still have borne the old Imperial insignia. 

The money which he handled and with which 
he paid his bills at the inns was stamped with the 
effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium, or 
one of his predecessors, just as the traveller in a 
distant British colony to-day, though that province 
is virtually independent, will handle coins stamped 
with the effigies of English kings. But though 
the coinage was entirely Imperial, he would, upon 
a passport or a receipt for toll and many another 
official document he handled, often see side by side 
with and subordinate to the Imperial name the 
name of the chief of the local government. 

This phrase leads me to a feature in the sur- 
rounding society which we must not exaggerate, 
but which made it very different from that united 
and truly " Imperial " form of government which 
had covered all civilisation 200 to 100 years 
before. 

The descendants of those officers who from 200 
to 100 years before had only commanded regular 
or auxiliary forces in the Roman Army were 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 135 

now seated as almost independent local adminis- 
trators in the capitals of the Roman provinces. 

They still thought of themselves, in 550 say, as 
mere provincial powers within the one great Empire 
of Eome. But there was now no positive Central 
power remaining in Eome to control them. The 
Central power was far off in Constantinople. It 
was universally accepted, but it made no attempt 
to act. 

Let us suppose our traveller to be concerned in 
some commerce which brought him to the centres of 
local government throughout the Western Empire. 
Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, 
Aries. He has, let us say, successfully negotiated 
some business in Spain, which has necessitated his 
obtaining official documents. He must, that is, 
come into touch with officials and with the actual 
Government in Spain. Two hundred years before 
he would have seen the officials of, and got his 
papers from, a government directly dependent upon 
Rome. The name of the Emperor alone would have 
appeared on all the papers and his effigy on the 
seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are 
made out in the old official way and (of course) in 
Latin, all the public forces are still Roman, all 
the civilisation still the same unaltered Roman 
character ; has anything changed at all ? 

Let us see. 

To get his papers in the Capital he will be 



136 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

directed to the " Palatium." This word does not 
mean " Palace." 

When we say "palace" to-day we mean the 
house in which lives the real or nominal ruler of 
a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham 
Palace, St. James's Palace, the Palace in Madrid, 
and so on. 

But the original word Palatium had a very 
different meaning in late Roman society. It 
signified the official seat of Government, and in 
particular the centre from which the writs for 
Imperial taxation were issued, and to which the 
proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name was 
originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, 
on which the Caesars had their private house. As 
the mask of private citizenship was gradually 
thrown off by the Emperors, 600 to 500 years 
before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the 
Roman Army became more and more true and 
absolute sovereigns, their house became more and 
more the official centre of the Empire. 

The term " Palatium" thus became consecrated 
to a particular use. When the centre of Imperial 
power was transferred to Byzantium the word 
" Palatium " followed it ; and at last it was 
applied to local centres as well as to the Imperial 
city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its 
dignities and honours, in the whole of its official 
life, the Palatium means the machine of govern- 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 137 

ment, local or Imperial. Such a traveller \ as we 
have imagined in the middle of the sixth 
century comes, then, to that Spanish Palatiwm 
from which, throughout the five centuries of 
Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsula had been 
locally governed. What would he find ? 

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of 
clerks and officials, of exactly the same sort as 
had always inhabited the place, drawing up the 
same sort of documents as they had drawn up for 
generations, using certain fixed formulae, and doing 
everything in the Latin tongue. No local dialect 
was yet of the least importance. But he would 
also find that the building was used for acts of 
authority, and that these acts were performed in 
the name of a certain person (who was no longer 
the old Roman Governor) and his Council. It 
was this local person's name, rather than the 
Emperor's, which usually — or at any rate more and 
more frequently — appeared on the documents. 

Let us look closely at this new Person seated 
in authority over Spain, and at his Council : for 
from such men as he, and from the districts they 
ruled, the nations of our time and their royal 
families were to spring. 

The first thing that would be noticed on 
entering the presence of this Person who governed 
Spain would be that he still had all the insignia 
and manner of Roman Government. 



138 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor's 
Delegate had sat : the provincial delegate of the 
Emperor. On official occasions he would wear the 
official Roman garments : the orb and the sceptre 
were already his symbols (we may presume) as they 
had been those of the Emperor and the Emperor's 
local subordinates before him. But in two points 
this central official differed from the old local 
Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon 
whose machinery of taxation he relied for power. 

These two points were — first, that he was 
surrounded by a very powerful and somewhat 
jealous body of Great Men ; secondly, that he did 
not habitually give himself an Imperial Roman 
title, but was called Rex. 

Let us consider these points separately. 

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, 
and before that in Rome or at Ravenna, worked, 
as even absolute power must work, through a 
multitude of men. He was surrounded by high 
dignitaries, and there devolved from him a whole 
hierarchy of officials, with the most important of 
whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor 
had not been officially and regularly bound in with 
such a Council. His formulae of administration 
were personal formulae. Now and then he men- 
tioned his great officials, but he only mentioned 
them if he chose. 

This new local person, who had been very 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 139 

gradually and almost unconsciously substituted 
for the old Eoman Governors, the Rex, was on 
the contrary a part of his own Council, and all 
his formulae of administration mentioned the 
Council as his coadjutors and assessors in adminis- 
tration. This was necessary above all (a most 
important point) in anything that regarded the 
public funds. 

It must not be imagined for a moment that the 
Rex issued laws or edicts, or (what was much 
more common and much more vital) levied taxation 
under the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, 
these great men about him. On the contrary, he 
spoke as absolutely as ever the Imperial Governors 
had done in the past, and indeed he could not do 
otherwise, because the whole machinery he had 
inherited presupposed absolute power. But some 
things were already said to be done " with " these 
great men : and it is of capital importance that we 
should note this word " with." The phrases of the 
official documents from that time run more and 
more in one of half-a-dozen regular formulae, all of 
which are based upon this idea of the Council, and 
in general such words as these : " So and so, Rex, 
ordered and commanded (with his chief men) that 
so and so . . . should be done." 

As to the second point : we note the change of 
title. The authority of the Palatium is a Rex ; 
not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent from 



140 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

the Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily 
nominated by him, but a Rex. Now what is the 
meaning of that word Rex ? 

It is usually translated by our word " King." 
But it does not here mean anything like what our 
word "King" means when we apply it to-day — 
or as we have applied it for many centuries. It 
does not mean the ruler of a large independent 
territory. It means a combination of two things 
when it is used to name these local rulers in the 
later Koman Empire. It means (1) The chieftain 
of an auxiliary group of soldiers who holds an 
Imperial commission ; and it means (2) That man 
acting as a local governor. 

(Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand 
years before, the word Rex had meant the chieftain 
of the little town and petty surrounding district 
of Rome or of some similar neighbouring small 
state. It had in the Latin language always 
retained some such connotation. The word " Rex " 
was often used in Latin literature as we use the 
word " King " in English : i.e. to describe the head 
of a state great or small. But as applied to the 
local rulers of the fifth century in western Europe 
it was not so used. It meant, as I have said, 
Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries. A Rex 
was not then, in Spain or in Gaul, a King in our 
modern sense of the word : he was only the 
military head of a particular armed force. He was 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 141 

originally the commander (hereditary, or chosen, 
or nominated by the Emperor) of an auxiliary 
force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, 
when the troops — originally recruited, perhaps, 
from some one barbaric district — changed by slow 
degrees into a body half police, half noble, their 
original name would extend to the whole local 
Army. The "Rex" of, say, Batavian auxiliaries, 
the commander of the Batavian corps, would 
probably be a man of Batavian blood, perhaps 
with hereditary position, and would be called u Rex 
Batavorum." Afterwards, when the recruiting 
was mixed, he still kept that title, and later still, 
when the Batavi as such had disappeared, his 
fixed title would remain. 

There was no similarity possible between the 
word Rex and the word Imperator, any more 
than there is between the words " Miners' Union " 
or "Trade Conference" and the word "England." 
There was of course no sort of equality. A 
Roman General in the early part of the process, 
planning a battle, would think of a Rex as we 
think of a Divisionary General. He might say, 
" I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My 
auxiliaries (Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) 
I shall put here. Send for their ' Rex ' and I will 
give him his orders." 

A Rex in this sense was a subject and often an 
unimportant subject of the Imperator or Emperor : 



142 EUKOPE AND THE FAITH 

the Imperator being, as we remember, the Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which 
institution the Roman state or Empire or civilisa- 
tion had depended for so many centuries. 

When the Roman Army began to add to itself 
auxiliary troops (drilled of course after the Roman 
fashion and forming one body with the Roman 
forces, but contracted for " in bulk" as it were) 
the chieftains of these barbaric and often small 
bodies were called, in the official language, Reges. 
Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, 
was the Rex of his officially appointed auxiliary 
force ; and since the nucleus of that force had 
once been a small body of Goths, and since Alaric 
held his position as an officer of that auxiliary 
force because he had once been, by inheritance, a 
chieftain of the Goths, the word Rex was attached 
to his Imperial commission in the Roman Army, 
and there was added to it the name of that 
particular barbaric tribe with which his command 
had originally been connected. He was Rex of 
the Roman auxiliary troops called " Goths." The 
"Rex" in Spain was "Rex Gotorum" not " Rex 
Hispaniae " — that was altogether a later idea. 
The Rex in Northern France was not " Rex 
Galliae," he was " Rex Francorum " ; in each 
case he was the Rex of the particular auxiliary 
troop from which his ancestors — sometimes genera- 
tions before — had originally drawn their Imperial 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 143 

commission and their right to be officers in the 
Roman Army. 

Thus you will have the Rex Francorum, or 
King of the Franks, so styled in the Palatium at 
Paris, as late as, say, a.d. 700. Not because any 
body of " Franks " still survived as a separate 
corps — they had been but a couple of regiments 
or so l 200 years before and had long disappeared 
— but because the original title had derived from 
a Eoman auxiliary force of Franks. 

In other words, the old Roman local legislative 
and taxing power, the reality of which lay in the 
old surviving Roman machinery of a hierarchy 
of officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested 
in the hands of a man called " Rex " — that is, 
" Commander " of such and such an auxiliary 
force ; Commander of the Franks, for instance, 
or Commander of the Goths. He still commanded 
in the year 550 a not very large military force 
on which local government depended, and in this 
little Army the barbarians were still probably 
predominant, because, as we have seen, towards 
the end of the Empire the stuff of the Army had 
become barbaric and the armed force was mainly 
of barbaric recruitment. But that small military 
force was also, and as certainly, very mixed 

1 We have documentary record. The greater part of the Frankish 
auxiliaries under Olovis were baptized with their General. They came 
to only 4000 men. 



144 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

indeed. Many a slave or broken Roman freedman 
would enlist, for it had privileges and advantages 
of great value ; * no one cared in the least whether 
the members of the armed forces which sustained 
society were Roman, Gallic, Italian, or German 
in racial origin. They were of all races and 
origins. Very shortly after — by, say, 600 at latest 
— the Army had become a universal rough levy 
of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of race 
was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging 
by hereditary right to certain families and called 
their " laws." 

Again, there was no conception of rebellion 
against the Empire in the mind of a Rex. All 
these Reges without exception held their military 
office and power originally by a commission from 
the Empire. All of them derived their authority 
from men who had been regularly established as 
Imperial functionaries. When the central power 
of the Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the 
Rex, as a fact, administered the whole machinery 
without control. 

But no Rex ever tried to emancipate himself 
from the Empire or warred for independence 
against the Emperor. The Rex, the local man, 

1 Hence the "leges" or codes specially regulating the status of these 

Roman troops, and called in documents the laws of the "Goths" or 

'Burgundians," as the case may be. There is a trace of old barlaric 

customs in some of these, sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage, 

hut the mass of them are obviously Roman privileges. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 145 

undertook all government simply because the old 
Government above him, the central Government, 
had failed. No Rex ever called himself a local 
Imperator, or dreamed of calling himself so : 
and that is the most significant thing in all the 
transition between the full civilisation of the old 
Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Eoman 
armies invading Gaul, Spain, the ■western Germanies 
and Hungary, fought to conquer, to absorb, to 
be masters of and makers of the land they seized. 
No local governor of the later transition, no Rex 
of Vandal, Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor 
troop ever dreamt of such a thing. He might 
fight another local Rex to get part of his taxing- 
power or his treasure. He might take part in 
the great religious quarrels (as in Africa) and act 
tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to 
fight against the Empire as such, or to attempt 
conquest and rule over a "subject population," 
would have meant nothing to him ; in theory the 
Empire was still under one control. 

There, then, you have the picture of what held 
the levers of the machine of government during 
the period of its degradation and transformation, 
which followed the breakdown of central authority. 
Clovis, in the North of France, the Burgundian 
chieftain at Aries, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild 
later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men 
who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken 

L 



146 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

local Roman administration, who worked entirely 
by it, and whose machinery of administration 
wherever they went was called by the Roman and 
official name of Palatium. 

Their families were originally of barbaric stock : 
they had for their small armed forces a military 
institution descended and derived from the Roman 
auxiliary forces ; often, especially in the early 
years of their power, they spoke a mixed and 
partly barbaric tongue 1 more easily than pure 
Latin ; but every one of them was a soldier of 
the declining Empire and regarded himself as a 
part of it, not as even conceivably an enemy of it. 

When we appreciate this we can understand 
how insignificant were those changes of frontier 
which make so great a show in historical atlases. 

The Rex of such and such an auxiliary force 
dies, and divides his " kingdom" between two sons. 
What does that mean ? Not that a nation with 
its customs and its whole form of administration 
was suddenly divided into two, still less that there 
has been what to-day we call " annexation " or 
" partition " of states. It simply means; that the 
honour and advantage of administration are divided 
between the two heirs, who take, the one the one 

1 The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely 
latinised through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and 
of course what we call "Teutonic Languages" are in reality half 
Roman, long before wo got our first full documents in the eighth and 
ninth centuries. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 147 

area, the other the other, over which to gather 
taxes and to receive personal profit. It must 
always be remembered that the personal privilege 
so received was very small in comparison with 
the total revenue to be administered, and that 
the vast mass of public work as carried on by the 
judiciary, the officers of the Treasury, and so forth, 
continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally 
Imperial. This governmental world of clerks and 
civil servants lived its own life and was only in 
theory dependent upon the Rex, and the Rex was 
no more than the successor of the chief local 
Roman official. 1 

The Rex, by the way, called himself always 
by some definite inferior Roman title, such as 
Vir Inluster, never anything more, as an English- 
man to-day might be called " Sir Charles So-and- 
so," or " Lord So-and-so " ; and often (as in the 
case of Clovis) he not only accepted directly 
from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but 
observed the old popular Roman customs, such as 
largesse and procession, upon his induction into 
that office. 

Now why did not this man, this Rex, in Italy 
or Gaul or Spain, simply remain in the position 

1 Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education 
by their way of colouring these districts, as though they were separate 
modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism 
was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, eastern and western, 
Greek and Latin. 



148 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of local Roman Governor ? One would imagine, 
if one did not know more about that society, that 
he should have done this. 

The small auxiliary forces of which he had been 
chieftain rapidly merged into the body of the 
Empire, as had the infinitely larger mass of slaves 
and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for 
century after century before that time. The body 
of civilisation was one, and we wonder, at first, 
why its moral unity did not continue to be re- 
presented by a central Monarch. Though the 
civilisation continued to decline, its forms should, 
one would think, have remained unchanged, and 
the theoretic attachment of each of these sub- 
ordinates to the Roman Emperor at Constantinople 
should have endured indefinitely. As a fact, the 
memory of the old central authority of the Emperor 
was gradually forgotten ; the Rex and his local 
government as they got weaker also got more 
isolated. He came to coining his own money, 
to treating directly as a completely independent 
ruler. At last the idea of " kings " and " kingdoms " 
took shape in men's minds. Why ? 

The reason that the nature of authority very 
slowly changed, that the last links with the Roman 
Empire of the East — that is, with the supreme head 
at Constantinople — gradually dissolved in the west, 
and that the modern nation arose around these 
local governments of the Reges, is to be found in 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 149 

that novel feature, the standing Council of Great 
Men round the Rex, with whom everything is 
done. 

This standing Council expressed three forces, 
which between them were transforming society. 
Those three forces were : first, certain vague 
underlying national feelings older than the Empire, 
Gallic, Britannic, Iberian ; secondly, the economic 
force of the great Roman landowners ; and, lastly, 
the living organisation of the Catholic Church. 

On the economic or material side of society 
the great landowners were the chief reality of that 
time. 

We have no statistics to go upon. But the 
facts of the time and the nature of its institutions 
are quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In 
Spain, in Gaul, in Italy as in Africa, economic 
power had concentrated into the hands of exceed- 
ingly few men. A few hundred men and women, 
a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal 
sees) had come to own much the most of the land 
on which these millions and millions lived ; and, 
with the land, much the most of the implements 
and of the slaves. 

As to the descent of these great landowners none 
asked or cared. By the middle of the sixth 
century only a minority perhaps were still of 
unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were 
purely barbaric. Lands waste or confiscated 



150 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

through the decline of population or the effect of 
the interminable wars and the plagues r lay in the 
power of the Palatium, which granted them out 
again (strictly under the eye of the Council of 
Great Men) to new holders. 

The few who had come in as original followers 
and dependants of the " chieftain " of the auxiliary 
forces benefited largely ; but the thing that really 
concerns the story of civilisation is not the origin 
of these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), 
nor their sense of race (which simply did not 
exist), but the fact that they were so few. It 
explains both what happened and what was to 
happen. 

That a handful of men, for they were no more 
than a handful, should thus be in control of the 
economic destinies of mankind — the result of 
centuries of Roman development in that direc- 
tion — is the key to all the material decline of 
the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise, 
with an object-lesson for our own politics to-day. 

The decline of the Imperial power was mainly 
due to this extraordinary concentration of economic 
power in the hands of a few. It was these few 
great Roman landowners who in every local 
government endowed each of the new adminis- 
trators, each new Bex, with a tradition of Imperial 
power, not a little of the dread that went with the 
old Imperial name, and the armed force which it 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 151 

connoted : everywhere the Rex had to reckon with 
the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This 
was the first element in that standing " Council of 
Great Men" which was the mark of the time in 
every locality and wore down the old official, 
imperial, absolute, local power. 

There was, however, as I have said, another and 
a much more important element in the Council of 
Great Men, besides the chief landowners ; it con- 
sisted in the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church. 

Every Roman city of that time had a principal 
personage in it, who knew its life better than 
anybody else, who had, more than any one else, 
power over its morals and ideas, and who in many 
cases actually administered its affairs. That person 
was the Bishop. 

Throughout Western Europe at that moment 
men's interest and preoccupation was not race nor 
even material prosperity, but religion. The great 
duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church 
was now decided, after two hard centuries of 
struggle, in favour of the latter. The Catholic 
Church, from a small but definite and very 
tenacious organisation within the Empire, and on 
the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, first, to be 
the only group of men which knew its own mind 
(a.d. 200) ; next, to be the official religion (a.d. 
300) ; finally, to be the cohesive political principle 
of the great majority of human beings (a.d. 400). 



152 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The modern man can distinctly appreciate the 
phenomenon, if for " creed" he will read " capital," 
and for the " Faith," " industrial civilisation." For 
just as to-day men principally care for great 
fortunes, and in pursuit of them go indifferently 
from country to country, and sink, as unimportant 
compared with such an object, the other businesses 
of our time, so the men of the fifth and sixth 
centuries were intent upon the unity and exactitude 
of religion. That the religion to which the Empire 
was now converted, the religion of the Catholic 
Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupa- 
tion. For this they exiled themselves ; for this 
they would and did run great risks ; as minor to 
this they sank all other things. 

The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power 
at that moment, civil and economic as well as 
religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it 
was only its leader. And in connection with that 
intense preoccupation of men's minds, two factors 
already appear in the fourth century and are 
increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. 
The first is the desire that the living Church should 
be as free as possible ; hence the Catholic Church 
and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth 
of local as against centralised power. They do so 
unconsciously but none the less strongly. The 
second factor is Arianism : to which I now 
return. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 153 

Arianism, which both in its material success and 
in the length of its duration, as well as in its 
concept of religion, and the character of its demise, 
is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement 
of recent centuries, had sprung up as the official 
and fashionable Court heresy opposed to the 
orthodoxy of the Church. 

The Emperor's Court did indeed at last — 
after many variations — abandon it, but a tradi- 
tion survived till long after (and in many places) 
that Arianism stood for the " wealthy " and 
" respectable " in life. 

Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken 
service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the 
greater part (the " Goths," for instance, as the 
generic term went, though that term had no longer 
any national meaning) had received their baptism 
into civilised Europe from Arian sources, and this 
in the old time of the fourth century, when 
Arianism was " the thing." Just as we see in 
eighteenth-century Ireland settlers and immigrants 
accepting Protestantism as " gentlemanly " or 
" progressive " (some there are, so provincial as 
still to feel thus), so the Rex in Spain and the Rex 
in Italy had a family tradition ; they, and the 
descendants of their original companions, were of 
what had been the " court " and " upper class " 
way of thinking. They were " Arians " and proud 
of it. The number of these powerful heretics in 



154 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

the little local court was small, but their irritant 
effect was great. 

It was the one great quarrel and problem of the 
time. 

No one troubled about race, but everybody was 
at white heat upon the final form of the Church. 

The populace felt it in their bones that if 
Arianism conquered, Europe was lost ; for Arianism 
lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation to 
accept the Incarnation, and therefore it would have 
bred sooner or later a denial of the Sacrament ; and 
at length it would have relapsed, as Protestantism 
has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagina- 
tion and of will would have been fatal to a society 
materially decadent. Had Arianism triumphed the 
aged Society of Europe would have perished. 

Now it so happened that of these local adminis- 
trators or governors who were rapidly becoming 
independent and who were surrounded by a 
powerful court, one only was not Arian. 

That one was the Rex Francorum or chieftain 
of the little barbaric auxiliary force of " Franks " 
which had been drawn into the Roman system 
from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. 
This body, at the time when the transformation 
took place between the old Imperial system and 
the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters 
in the Roman town of Tournai. 

A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 155 

whom his parents probably called by some such 
sound as Clodovig (they had no written language), 
succeeded ' his father, a Roman officer, 1 in the 
generalship of this small body of troops at the end 
of the fifth century. Unlike the other auxiliary 
generals he was pagan. When with other forces 
of the Roman Army he had repelled one of the last 
of the barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the 
Roman town of Tolbiacum, and succeeded to the 
power of local administration in Northern Gaul, 
he could not but assimilate himself with the 
civilisation wherein he was mixed, and he and 
most of his small command were baptized. He 
had already married a Christian wife, the daughter 
of the Burgundian Rex ; but in any case such a 
conclusion was inevitable. 

The important historical point is not that he 
was baptized; for an Auxiliary General to be 
baptized was, by the end of the fifth century, as 
much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader 
from Bombay, who has become an English Lord or 
Baronet in London in our time, to wear trousers 
and a coat. The important thing is that he was 
received and baptized by Catholics and not by 
Avians — in the midst of that enormous struggle. 

Clodovicus— known in history as Clovis— came 
from a remote corner of civilisation. His men were 

1 He was presumably head of Auxiliaries. His tomb has been found 
It is wholly Roman. 



156 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism ; 
they had no tradition that it was " the thing " or 
"smart" to adopt the old court heresy which was 
offensive to the poorer mass of Europeans. When, 
therefore, this Rex Francorum was settled in 
Paris — about the year 500 — and was beginning to 
administer local government in Northern Gaul, the 
weight of his influence was thrown with the 
popular feeling and against the Arian Eeges in 
Italy and Spain. 

The new armed forces of the Rex Francorum, 
a general levy continuing the old Roman tradition, 
settling things once and for all by battle, carried 
orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. 
They turned the Arian Rex out of Toulouse, they 
occupied the valley of the Rhone. For a moment 
it seemed as though they would support the 
Catholic populace against the Arian officials in 
Italy itself. 

At any rate, their championship of popular and 
general religion against the irritant, small adminis- 
trative Arian bodies in the Palatium of this 
region and of that, was a very strong lever which 
the people and the Bishops at their head could 
not but use in favour of the Rex Francorum! 's 
independent power. It was therefore, indirectly, 
a very strong lever for breaking up the now (500- 
600) decayed and almost forgotten administrative 
unity of the Roman world. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 157 

Under such forces — the power of the Bishop in 
each town and district, the growing independence 
of the few and immensely rich great landowners, 
the occupation of the Palatium and its official 
machinery by the chieftains of the old auxiliary 
forces — Western Europe slowly, very slowly, 
shifted its political base. 

For three generations the mints continued to 
strike money under the effigy of the Emperor. 
The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of 
taking, the Imperial title ; the roads were still kept 
up, the Roman tradition in the arts of life, though 
coarsened, was never lost. In cooking, dress, 
architecture, law, and the rest all the world was 
Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or 
Latin Empire not only lacked a civilian and 
military centre, but gradually lost all need for 
such a centre. 

Towards the year 600, though our civilisation 
was still one, as it had always been, from the 
British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even 
(through missionaries) extended its effect a few 
miles eastward of the old Roman frontier beyond 
the Rhine, men no longer thought of that civilisa- 
tion as a highly denned area within which they 
could always find the civilian authority of one 
organ. Men no longer spoke of our Europe as the 
Respublica or " common weal." It was already 
beginning to become a mass of small and often 



158 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

overlapping divisions. The things that are older 
than, and lie beneath, all exact political institu- 
tions, the popular legends, the popular feelings for 
locality and countrysides, were rising everywhere ; 
the great landowners were appearing as semi- 
independent rulers, each on his own estates (though 
the many estates of one man were often widely 
separated). 

The daily speech of men was already becoming 
divided into an infinity of jargons. 

Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, 
some, as in the Germanies and Scandinavia, mixed 
original Teutonic and Latin ; some, as in Brittany, 
were Celtic ; some, as in the Western Pyrenees, 
Basque ; in North Africa, we may presume, the 
indigenous tongue of the Berbers resumed its 
sway ; Punic also may have survived in certain 
towns and villages there. l But men paid no 
attention to the origin of such diversities. The 
common unity that survived was expressed in 
the fixed Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church ; 
and the Church, now everywhere supreme in the 
decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the 
principle of life throughout all this great area of 
the west. 

So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt 
annexed to Gaul that had risen in the Germanies 
to the east of the Rhine ; so with nearly all Italy 

1 We have evidence that it survived in the fifth century. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 159 

and Dalmatia, and what to-day we call Switzerland 
and a part of what to-day we call Bavaria and 
Baden ; bo with what to-day we call Spain and 
Portugal ; and so (after local adventures of a 
parallel sort, followed by a reconquest against 
Arians by Imperial officers and armies) with North 
Africa and with a strip of Andalusia. 

But one part of one province did suffer a 
limited and local — but sharp — change; on one 
frontier belt, narrow but long, came something 
much more nearly resembling a true barbaric 
success, and the results thereof, than anything 
which the Continent could show. 1 There was here 
a real breach of continuity with Boman things. 

This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt 
of the province of Britain ; and we have next to 
ask : " What happened in Britain when the rest 
of the Empire was being transformed, after the 
breakdown of central Imperial power f " Unless 
we can answer that question we shall fail to 
possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe 
and of the early perils in spite of which that 
continuity has survived. 

I turn, therefore, next to answer the question : 
" "What happened in Britain ? " 

1 What happened on the Danube was similar but not so sharply cut 
off. There also the Church decayed. 



V 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 



161 M 



V 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 

I have now carried this essay through four sections. 
My object in writing it is to show that the Roman 
Empire never perished but was only transformed ; 
that the Catholic Church which it accepted in its 
maturity caused it to survive, and was, in that 
origin of Europe, and has since remained, the soul 
of our Western civilisation. 

In the first chapter I sketched the nature of 
1 the Roman Empire ; in the second the nature of 
the Church within the Roman Empire before that 
civilisation in its maturity accepted the Faith ; 
in the third I attempted to lay before the reader 
that transformation and material decline (it was 
also a survival) which has erroneously been called 
" the fall " of the Roman Empire ; in the fourth 
I presented a picture of what society must have 
seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of that 
transformation and at the entry into what are 
called the Dark Ages — the beginnings of the 
modern European nations which have superficially 
differentiated from the old unity of Rome. 

163 



164 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

I could wish that space had permitted me to 
describe a hundred other contemporary things 
which would enable the reader to seize both the 
magnitude and the significance of the great change 
from Pagan to Christian times. I should in 
particular have dwelt upon the transformation of 
the European mind with its increasing gravity, its 
ripening contempt for material things, and its 
resolution upon the ultimate fate of the human 
soul, which it now firmly concluded to be 
personally immortal and subject to a conscious 
destiny. 

This doctrine of personal immortality is the 
prime mark of the European, and stamps his leader- 
ship upon the world. 

Its original seat — long before history begins — 
lay perhaps in Ireland, later in Britain, and was 
certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or 
in Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece, and 
even had some influence upon the Jews before the 
Romans subdued them. But it remained an 
opinion, an idea looming in the dark, till it was 
seen strong and concrete in the full light of the 
Catholic Church. Oddly enough Mahomet, who in 
most things reacted towards weakness of flesh and 
spirit, adopted this Western doctrine fully ; it 
provided his system with its vigour. Everywhere 
is that doctrine of immortality the note of superior 
intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 165 

the thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Every- 
where does it accompany health and decision. 

Its only worthy counterpart (equally European 
but rare, unrooted and private) is the bold affirma- 
tion of complete and final death. 

The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, 
in the fourth century and the fifth was eventually 
its preservation, in peril of full decay, by its 
acceptation of the Faith. 

To this I might have attached the continued care- 
lessness for the plastic arts and for much in letters, 
the continued growth in holiness, and all that 
" salting," as it were, which preserved civilisation 
and kept it whole until, after the long sequestration 
of the Dark Ages, it should discover an opportunity 
for revival. 

My space has not permitted me to describe 
these things. I must turn at once to the last, and 
what is for my readers the chief, of the historical 
problems presented by the beginning of the Dark 
Ages ; that problem is the fate of Britain. 

The importance of deciding what happened in 
Britain when the central government of Rome 
failed does not lie in the fact that an historical 
conclusion one way or the other can affect the 
truth. European civilisation is still one whether 
men see that unity or no. The Catholic Church 
is still the soul of it, whether men know it or do 
not know it. But the problem presented by the 



166 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

fate of Britain at that critical moment when the 
provinces of the Roman Empire became inde- 
pendent of any common secular control, has this 
practical importance : that those who read it 
wrongly and who provide their readers with a false 
solution (as the Protestant German school and their 
copiers in this country, Freeman, Green, and the 
rest, have done) not only furnish arguments against 
the proper unity of our European story, but also 
produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such men 
as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of 
Britain at the entry into the Dark Ages take for 
granted many other things historically untrue. 
Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else 
that is historical truth — for instance, the character 
of the Normans ; and even contemporary and 
momentous truth before our eyes, to-day — for in- 
stance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. 
They not only render an Englishman ignorant of 
his own nation and therefore of himself, they also 
render all men ignorant of Europe ; for a know- 
ledge of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the 
period 1530-1630 is the test of European history. 
And if you are wrong on these two points, you are 
wrong on the whole. 

A man who desires to make out that the Empire 
— that is, European civilisation — was "cooquered" 
by barbarians cannot to-day, in the light of modern 
research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 167 

or in the valley of the Rhine. The old German 
thesis of a barbaric " conquest " upon the Continent, 
possible when Modern History was a child, has 
necessarily been abandoned in its maturity.- But 
that thesis still tries to make out a plausible case 
when it speaks of Britain, because so much of the 
record here is lost that there is more room for make- 
believe. Having made it out the tale of a German 
and barbaric England, this false result will power- 
fully affect modern and immediate conclusions 
upon our common civilisation, upon our institutions 
and their nature, and in particular upon the Faith 
and its authority in Europe. 

For if Britain be something other than England, 
if what we now know is not original to this Island 
but is of the Northern German Barbarism in race 
and tradition, if in the breakdown of the Roman 
Empire Britain was the one exceptional province 
which really did become a separate barbaric ithing, 
cut off at the roots from the rest of civilisation, 
then those who desire to believe that the institu- 
tions of Europe are of no universal effect, that the 
ancient laws of the Empire — as on property and 
marriage — were local, and in particular that the 
Reformation was the revolt of a race — and of a 
strong and conquering race — against the decaying 
traditions of Rome, have something to stand on. 
It does not indeed help them to prove that our 
civilisation is bad or that the Faith is untrue; 



168 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

but it permits them to despair of, or to despise, 
the unity of Europe, and to regard the present 
Protestant world as something which is destined 
to supplant that unity. 

Such a point of view is wrong historically as it 
is wrong in morals. It will find no basis of military 
success in the future any more than it has in the 
past. 1 It must ultimately break down if ever it 
should attempt to put into practice its theory of 
superiority in barbaric things. But meanwhile, as 
a self-confident theory it can do harm indefinitely 
great by warping a great section of the European 
mind ; bidding it refer its character to imaginary 
barbaric origins ; so divorcing it from the majestic 
spirit of Western civilisation. The North German 
"Teutonic" school of false popular history can 
create its own imaginary past, and lend to such 
a figment the authority of antiquity and of 
lineage. 

To show how false this modern school of history 
has been, but also what opportunities it had for 
advancing its thesis, is the object of what follows. 

Britain, be it remembered, is to-day the only 
part of the Roman world in which a conscious 
antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilisa- 
tion of Europe exists. The Northern Germanies 
and Scandinavia, which have had, since the 

1 I wrote and first printed these words in 1912. I leave theni standing 
with greater force in 1919. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 169 

Reformation, a religious agreement with all that 
is still politically powerful in Britain, lay outside 
the old civilisation. They would not have sur- 
vived the schism of the sixteenth century had 
Britain resisted that schism. When we come to 
deal with the story of the Reformation in Britain, 
we shall see how the strong popular resistance 
to the Reformation nearly overcame that small 
wealthy class which used the religious excitement 
of an active minority as an engine to obtain 
material advantage for themselves. But, as a 
fact, in Britain the popular resistance to the 
Reformation failed. A violent and almost uni- 
versal persecution, directed in the main by the 
wealthier classes against the religion of the English 
populace and the funds which endowed it, just 
happened to succeed. In little more than a 
hundred years the newly enriched had won the 
battle. By the year 1630 the Faith of the British 
masses had been stamped out from the Highlands 
to the Channel. 

It is our business to understand that this 
phenomenon, the moral severance of Britain from 
Europe, was a phenomenon of the sixteenth century 
and not of the fifth, and that Britain was in no 
way predestined by race or tradition to so lament- 
able and tragic a loss. 

Let us state the factors in the problem. 

The main factor in the problem is that the 



170 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

history of Great Britain from just before the 
middle of the fifth century (say the years 420 to 
445) until the landing of St. Augustine in 597 
is a blank. 

It is of the first importance to the student of 
general history in Europe to seize this point. It 
is true of no other Roman western province, and 
the truth of it has permitted a vast amount of 
empty assertion, most of it recent, and nearly all 
of it as demonstrably false as it is obviously 
created by a religious bias. When there is no 
proof or record men can imagine almost anything, 
and the anti-Catholic historians have stretched 
imagination to the last possible limit in filling 
this blank with whatever could tell against the 
continuity of civilisation. 

It is the business of those who love historic 
truth to get rid of such speculations as of so 
much rubbish, and to restore to the general reader 
the few certain facts upon which he can solidly 
build. 

Let me repeat that, had Britain remained 
true to the unity of Europe in that unfortunate 
oppression of the sixteenth century which ended 
in the loss of the Faith, had the populace stood 
firm or been able to succeed in the field and under 
arms, or to strike terror into their oppressors by 
an efficient revolt — in other words, had the 
England of the Tudors remained Catholic, the 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 171 

solution of this ancient problem of the early Dark 
Ages would present no immediate advantage, nor 
perhaps would the problem interest men, even 
academically. England would now be one with 
Europe as she had been for a thousand years 
before the uprooting of the Reformation. But, 
as things are, the need for correction is immediate 
and its success of momentous effect. No true 
historian, even though he should most bitterly 
resent the effect of Catholicism upon the European 
mind, can do other than combat what was until 
quite recently the prevalent teaching with regard 
to the fate of Britain when the central government 
of the Empire decayed. 

I will first deal with the evidence — such as it 
is — which has come down to us upon the fate 
of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, 
and next consider the conclusions to which such 
evidence should lead us. 

I 

The Evidence 

"When we have to deal with a gap in history 
(and though none in western European history is 
so strangely empty as this, yet there are very 
many minor ones which enable us to reason from 
their analogy) two methods of bridging the gap 
are present to the historian. The first is research 



172 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

into such rare contemporary records as may illus- 
trate the period ; the second is the parallel of 
what has happened elsewhere in the same case, 
or, better still (when that is possible), the example 
of what was proceeding in similar places and under 
similar circumstances at the same time. And there 
is a third thing : both of these methods must be 
submitted to the criterion of common sense more 
thoroughly and more absolutely than the evidence 
of fuller periods. For when you have full evidence 
even of a thing extraordinary you must admit its 
truth ; but when there is little evidence guess- 
work comes in, and common sense is the correction 
of guesswork. 

If, for instance, I learn, as I can learn from 
contemporary records and from the witness of 
men still living, that at the battle of Gettysburg 
infantry advanced so boldly as to bayonet gunners 
at their guns, I must believe it although the event 
is astonishing. 

If I learn, as I can learn, that a highly civilised 
and informed government like that of the French 
in 1870, entering into a war against a great rival, 
had only the old muzzle-loading cannon when their 
enemies were already equipped with modern breech- 
loading pieces, I must accept it on overwhelming 
evidence, in spite of my astonishment. 

When even the miraculous appears in a record — 
if its human evidence is multiple, converging, and 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 173 

exact— I must accept it or deny the value of 
human evidence. 

But when I am dealing with a period or an 
event for which evidence is lacking or deficient, 
then obviously it is a sound criterion of criticism 
to accept the probable and not to presuppose the 
improbable. Common sense and general experi- 
ence are nowhere more necessary than in their 
application, whether in a court of law or in the 
study of history, to those problems whose difficulty 
consists in the absence of direct proof. 1 

Remembering all this, let us first set down what 
is positively known from record with regard to 
the fate of Britain in the hundred and fifty years 

of " the gap." 

We begin by noting that there were many 
groups of German soldiery in Britain before the 
Pirate raids, and that the south-east was— 
whether on account ol earlier pirate raids or on 
account of Saxon settlers, the descendants of 
Roman soldiers— called "the Saxon shore" long 
before the Imperial system broke down. 

Next we turn to documents. 

i For instance, there is no contemporary account mentioning London 
during the last half of the fifth and nearly all the sixth century Green 
Freeman, Stubbs, say (making it up as they go along) that London ceased 
to exist : disappeared ! Then (they assert) after a long period of com- 
plete abandonment it was laboriously cleared by a totally new race 
men and as laboriously rebuilt on exactly the same site ! The thm is 
not physically impossible, but it is so exceedingly improbable that 
common sense laughs at it. 



174 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

There is exactly one contemporary document 
professing to tell us anything at all of what 
happened within this considerable period, exactly 
one document set down by a witness ; and that 
document is almost valueless for our purpose. 

It bears the title, De Excidio Brittaniae Liber 
Querulus. St. Gildas, a monk, was its author. 
The exact date of its compilation is a matter of 
dispute : necessarily so, for the whole of that time 
is quite dark. But it is certainly not earlier than 
545. So it was written one hundred years after 
the beginning of that darkness which covers 
British history for one hundred and fifty years. 
Most of the Roman Regulars had been called away 
for a Continental campaign in 410. They had often 
so left the island before. But this time the troops 
sent out on expedition did not return. Britain was 
visited in 429 and 447 by men who left records. 
It was not till 597 that St. Augustine landed. 
St. Augustine landed only fifty years at the most 
after Gildas wrote his Liber Querulus, whereas the 
snapping of the links between the Continent and 
south-eastern Britain had taken place at least a 
hundred years before. 

Well, it so happens that this book is, as I have 
called it, almost valueless for history. It is good in 
morals ; its author complains, as all just men must 
do in all times, of the wickedness of powerful men, 
and of the vices of the rich. It is a homily. The 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 175 

motive of it is not history, but the reformation of 
morals. In all matters extending to more than a 
lifetime before that of the writer, in all matters, 
that is, on which he could not obtain personal 
evidence, he is hopelessly at sea. He is valuable 
only in giving us the general impression of military 
and social struggles as they struck a monk who 
desired to make them the text of a sermon. 

He vaguely talks of Saxon auxiliaries from the 
North Sea being hired (in the traditional Eoman 
manner) by some Prince in Roman Britain to fight 
savages who had come out of the Highlands of 
Scotland and were raiding. He says this use of 
new auxiliaries began after the Third Consulship 
of Aetius (whom he calls " Agitius "), that is, after 
a.d. 446. He talks still more vaguely of the 
election of local kings to defend the island from 
the excesses of these auxiliaries. He is quite as 
much concerned with the incursions of robber 
bands of Irish and Scotch into the civilised Roman 
province as he is with the few Saxon auxiliaries 
who were thus called in to supplement the arms of 
the Roman provincials. 

He speaks only of a handful of these auxiliaries, 
three boatloads ; but he is so vague and ill- 
instructed on the whole of this early period — a 
hundred years before his time — that one must 
treat his account of the transaction as half 
legendary. He tells us that "more numerous 



176 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

companies followed," and we know what that 
means in the case of the Eoman auxiliaries through- 
out the Empire : a few thousand armed men. 

He goes on to say that these auxiliaries, 
mutinying for pay (another parallel to what we 
should expect from the history of all the previous 
hundred years all over Europe), threatened to 
plunder the civil population. Then comes one 
sentence of rhetoric saying how they ravaged the 
countrysides " in punishment for our previous 
sins," until the "flames" of the tumult actually 
" licked the Western Ocean." It is all (and there is 
much more) just like what we read in the rhetoric 
of the lettered men on the Continent who watched 
the comparatively small but destructive bands of 
barbarian auxiliaries in revolt, with their accom- 
paniment of escaped slaves and local ne'er-do- 
weels, crossing Gaul and pillaging. If we had no 
record of the Continental troubles but that of some 
one religious man using a local disaster as the 
opportunity for a moral discourse, historians could 
have talked of Gaul exactly as they talk of Britain 
on the sole authority of St. Gildas. All the 
exaggeration to which we are used in Continental 
records is here : the " gleaming sword " and the 
"flame crackling," the "destruction" of cities (which 
afterward quietly continue an unbroken life !), and 
all the rest of it. We know perfectly well that 
on the Continent similar language was used to 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 177 

describe the predatory actions of little bodies of 
barbarian auxiliaries ; actions calamitous and tragic, 
no doubt, but not universal and in no way finally 
destructive of civilisation. 

It must not be forgotten that St. Gildas also 
tells us of the return home of many barbarians 
with plunder (which is again what we should have 
expected). But at the end of this account he 
makes an interesting point which shows that, 
even if we had nothing but his written record to 
judge by, the barbarian pirates had got some sort 
of foothold on the eastern coasts of the island. 

For after describing how the Eomano-British 
of the province organised themselves under one 
Ambrosius Aurelianus, and stood their ground, he 
tells us that "sometimes the citizens" (that is, the 
Roman and civilised men), " sometimes the enemy 
were successful," down to the thorough defeat of 
some raiding body or other of the Pagans at an 
unknown place which he calls " Mons Badonicus." 
This decisive action, he also tells us, took place in 
the year of his own birth. 

Now the importance of this last point is that 
Gildas after that date can talk of things which he 
really knew. Let any one who reads this page 
recall a great event contemporary with or nearly 
following his own birth, and see how different is 
his knowledge of it from his knowledge of that 
which came even a few years before. This is so 

N 



178 EUBOPE AND THE FAITH 

to-day with all the advantages of full record. 
How much greater would the contrast between 
things really known and hearsay be when there 
was none ! 

This defeat of the Pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon 
Gi-ildas calls the last but not the least slaughter of 
the barbarians ; and though he probably wrote in 
the West of Britain, yet we know certainly from 
his contemporary evidence that during the whole 
of his own lifetime up to the writing of this booh 
— a matter of some forty-four years — there was 
no more serious fighting. In other words, we are 
certain that the little pagan courts settled on the 
east coast of Britain were balanced by a remaining 
mass of declining Boman civilisation elsewhere, 
and that there was no attempt at anything like 
expansion or conquest from the east westward. 
For this state of affairs, remember, we have direct 
contemporary evidence during the whole lifetime 
of a man and up to within at the most fifty years 
— perhaps less — from the day when St. Augustine 
landed in Kent and restored record and letters to 
the east coast. 

We have more rhetoric and more homilies about 
the " deserted cities and the wickedness of men 
and the evil life of the Kings " ; but that you 
might hear at any period. All we really get from 
Gildas is: (1) The confused tradition of a rather 
heavy predatory raid conducted by barbaric 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 179 

auxiliaries summoned from across the North Sea 
in true Roman fashion to help a Roman province 
against uncivilised invaders, Scotch and Irish ; (2) 
— (which is most important) — The obtaining by 
these auxiliary troops or their rulers (though in 
small numbers it is true) of political power over 
some territory within the island ; (3) The early 
cessation of any racial struggle, or conflict between 
Christian and Pagan, or between Barbarian and 
Roman ; even of so much as would strike a man 
living within the small area of Britain ; and the 
confinement of the new little Pagan Pirate courts 
to the east coast during the whole of the first half 
of the sixth century. 

Here let us turn the light of common sense on 
to these most imperfect, confused, and few facts 
which Gildas gives us. What sort of thing would 
a middle-aged man, writing in the decline of letters 
and with nothing but poor and demonstrably 
distorted verbal records to go by, set down with 
regard to a piece of warfare, if (a) that man were 
a monk and a man of peace, (b) his object were 
obviously not history but a sermon on morals, and 
(c) the fighting was between the Catholic Faith, 
which was all in all to the men of his time, and 
Pagans ? Obviously he would make all he could 
of the old and terrified legends of the time long 
before his birth, he would get more precise as his 
birth approached (though always gloomy and 



180 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

exaggerating the evil), and he would begin to tell 
us precise facts with regard to the time he could 
himself remember. Well, all we get from St. 
Gildas is the predatory incursions of pagan savages 
from Scotland and Ireland, long, long before he 
was born ; a small number of auxiliaries called in 
to help the Eoman Provincials against these ; the 
permanent settlement of these auxiliaries in some 
quarter or other of the island (we know from other 
evidence that it was the east and south-east coast) ; 
and (d) — what is of capital importance because it 
is really contemporary, the settling down of the 
whole matter, apparently during Gildas' s own 
lifetime in the sixth century — from, say, a.d. 500 or 
earlier to, say, 545 or later. 

I have devoted so much space to this one 
writer, whose record would hardly count in a time 
where any sufficient historical document existed, 
because his book is absolutely the only one 
contemporary piece of evidence we have upon the 
pirate, or Saxon, raiding of Britain. 1 There are 
interesting fragments about it in the various 
documents known (to us) collectively to-day as 
TJie Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — but these docu- 
ments were compiled many hundreds of years 
afterwards and had nothing better to go on than 
St. Gildas himself and possibly a few vague legends. 

1 The single sentence in Prosper is insignificant, and, what is more, 
demonstrably false as it stands. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 181 

Now we happen to have in this connection a 
document which, though not contemporary, must 
be considered as evidence of a kind. It is sober 
and full, written by one of the really great men of 
Catholic and European civilisation, written in a 
spirit of wide judgement and written by a founder 
of history : the Venerable Bede. 

True, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical 
History was not produced until three hundred 
years after the first raids of these predatory bands, 
not until nearly two hundred years after St. 
Gildas, and not until one hundred and forty years 
after reading and writing and the full tide of 
Eoman civilisation had come back to Eastern 
Britain with St. Augustine : but certain funda- 
mental statements of his are evidence. 

Thus the fact that the Venerable Bede takes for 
granted permanent pirate settlements (established 
as regular, if small, states) all the way along the 
North Sea coast from the northern part of Britain in 
which he wrote, brought down to the central south 
by Southampton Water, is a powerful or rather 
a conclusive argument in favour of the existence 
of such states some time before he wrote. It is not 
credible that a man of this weight would write as 
he does without solid tradition behind him ; and 
he tells us that the settlers on this coast of Britain 
came from three lowland tribes, German and 
Danish, called Saxons, Jutes, and Angles. 



182 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The first name " Saxon " 1 was at that time the 
name of certain pirates inhabiting two or three 
small islands on the coast between the Elbe and 
the Rhine. Ptolemy puts these " Saxons," two 
hundred years earlier, just beyond the mouth of 
the Elbe; the Romans knew them as scattered 
pirates in the North Sea, irritating the coasts of 
Gaul and Britain for generations. The name later 
spread to a large inland confederation : but that 
was the way with German tribal names. The 
German tribal names do not stand for fixed races 
or even provinces but for chance agglomerations 
which suddenly rise and as suddenly disappear. 
The local term "Saxon" in the fifth and sixth 
century has nothing to do with the general term 
" Saxon " applied to all north - west of the 
Germanies two hundred years or more afterwards. 

These Pirates, then, provided small bands of 
fighting men under chieftains who founded small 
organised governments north of the Thames 
Estuary, at the head of Southampton Water, and 
on the Sussex coast, where they may or may not 
have found (but more probably did find) existing 
settlements of their own people already established 
as colonies by the Romans. Their chiefs very 
probably captured the Roman fiscal organisation 
of the place, but seem rapidly to have degraded 

1 The name has retained a vague significance for centuries and is now 
attached to a population largely Slavonic and wholly Protestant south of 
Berlin — hundreds of miles from its original seat. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 183 

society by their barbaric incompetence. They 
learnt no new language but continued to talk that 
of their original seat on the Continent, which 
language was split up into a number of local 
dialects each of which was a mixture of original 
German and adopted Greek, Latin, and even Celtic 
words. 

Of the Jutes we know nothing ; there is a mass 
of modern guesswork about them, valueless like 
all such stuff. We must presume that they were 
an insignificant little tribe who sent out a few 
mercenaries for hire, but they had the advantage 
of sending out the first, for the handful of 
mercenaries whom the Roman British called into 
Kent were by all tradition Jutish. The Venerable 
Bede also bears witness to an isolated Jutish 
settlement in the Meon Valley near Southampton 
Water, comparable to the little German colonies 
established by the Romans at Bayeux in Normandy 
and near Rennes. 

The Angles were something more definite ; they 
held that corner of land where the neck of 
Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This 
we know for certain. There was a considerable 
immigration of them, enough to make their 
departure noticeable in the sparsely populated 
heaths of their district, and to make Bede record 
the Traveller's tale that their barren country still 
looked " depopulated." How many boatloads of 



184 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

thero., however, may have come, we have of course 
no sort of record : we only know from our common 
sense that the number must have been insignificant 
compared with the total free and slave population 
of a rich Eoman province. Their chiefs got a hold 
of the land far above the Thames Estuary, in 
scattered spots all up the east coast of Britain, as 
far as the Firth of Forth. 

There are no other authorities. There is no 
other evidence, save St. Gildas, a contemporary, 
and — two hundred years after him, three hundred 
after the first event — Bede. A mass of legend and 
worse nonsense called the Historia Brittonum 
exists indeed for those who consult it — but it has 
no relation to historical science nor any claim to 
rank as evidence. As we have it, it is centuries 
late, and it need not concern serious history. Even 
for the existence of Arthur — to which it is the 
principal witness — popular legend is a much better 
guide. As to the original dates of the various 
statements in the Historia Brittonum, those 
dates are guesswork. The legendary narrative 
as a whole, though very ancient in its roots, dates 
only from a period subsequent to Charlemagne, 
much more than a century later than Bede and 
a time far less cultured. 

The life of St. Germanus, who came and preached 
in Britain after the Roman legions had left, is 
contemporary, and deals with events sixty years 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 185 

before St. Gildas's birth. It would be valuable if 
it told us anything about the Pirate settlements on 
the coast — whether these were but the confirma- 
tion of older Roman Saxon garrisons or Roman 
agricultural colonies or what — but it tells us 
nothing about them. We know that St. Germanus 
dealt in a military capacity with " Picts and 
Scots " — >an ordinary barbarian trouble — but we 
have no hint at Saxon settlements. St. Germanus 
was last in Britain in 447, and it is good negative 
evidence that we hear nothing during that visit of 
any real trouble from the Saxon pirates who at 
that very time might be imagined, if legend were 
to be trusted, to be establishing their power in 
Kent. 

That ends the list of witnesses ; that is all our 
evidence} 

To sum up. So far as recorded history is 
concerned, all we know is this : that probably 
some but certainly only few of the Roman regular 
forces were to be found garrisoned in Britain after 
the year 410 ; that in the Roman Armies there 
had long been Saxon and other German auxiliaries, 
some of whom could naturally provide civilian 
groups, and that Rome even planted agricultural 
colonies of auxiliaries permanently within the 
Empire ; that the south and east coasts were 

1 On such a body of evidence — less than a morning's reading — did 
Green build up for popular sale his romantic Making of England. 



186 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

known as " the Saxon shore " even during 
Imperial times ; that the savages from Scotland 
and Ireland disturbed the civilised province 
cruelly ; that scattered pirates who had troubled 
the southern and eastern coasts for two centuries 
joined the Scotch and Irish ravaging bands ; that 
some of these where taken in as regular auxiliaries 
on the old Roman model somewhere about the 
middle of the fifth century (the conventional date 
is 445) ; that, as happened in many another 
Roman province, the auxiliaries mutinied for pay 
and did a good deal of bad looting and ravaging ; 
finally, that the ravaging was checked, and that the 
Pirates were thrown back upon some permanent 
settlements of theirs established during these 
disturbances along the easternmost and southern- 
most coasts. Their numbers must have been very 
small as compared with the original population. 
No town of any size was destroyed. 

Now it is most important in the face^of such a 
paucity of information to seize three points. 

First, that the ravaging was not appreciably 
worse, either in the way it is described or by 
any other criterion, than the troubles which the 
Continent suffered at the same time and which (as 
we know) did not there destroy the continuity or 
unity of civilisation. 

Secondly, that the sparse raiders, Pagan (as 
were also some few of those on the Continent) and 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 187 

incapable of civilised effort, obtained, as also did 
some upon the Continent (notably on the left 
bank of the Rhine), little plots of territory which 
they held and governed for themselves and in 
which, after a short period, the old Roman order 
decayed in the incapable hands of the newcomers. 

But, thirdly (and upon this all the rest will 
turn), the position which these less civilised and 
pagan small courts happened permanently to 
hold, were positions that cut the link between the 
Roman province of Britain and the rest of what 
had been the united Roman Empire. 

This last matter — not numbers, not race — is 
the capital point in the story of Britain between 
447 and 597. 

The uncivilised man happened, by a geographical 
accident, to have cut the communication of the 
island with its sister provinces of the Empire. 
He was numerically as insignificant, racially as 
unproductive and as ill-provided with fruitful or 
permanent institutions, as his brethren on the 
Rhine or the Danube. But on the Rhine and the 
Danube the Empire was broad. If a narrow fringe 
of it was ruined it was no great matter, only 
a retreat of a few miles. Those sea communica- 
tions between Britain and Europe were narrow 
— and the barbarian had been established across 
them. 

The circulation of men, goods, and ideas was 



188 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

stopped for one hundred and fifty years because 
the small pirate settlements (mixed perhaps with 
barbarian settlements already established by the 
Empire) had, by the gradual breakdown of the 
Eoman ports, destroyed communication with 
Europe from Southampton Water right north to 
beyond the Thames. 

It seems possible that even the great town of 
London, whatever its commercial relations, kept 
up no official or political business beyond the sea. 
The pirates had not gone inland ; but, with no 
intention of conquest (only of loot or continued 
establishment), they had snapped the bond by 
which Britain lived. 

Such is the direct evidence, and such our first 
conclusion on it. 

But of indirect indications, of reasonable sup- 
position and comparison between what came after 
the pirate settlements and what had been before, 
there is much more. By the use of this secondary 
matter added to the direct evidence one can fully 
judge both the limits and the nature of the 
misfortune that overtook Britain after the central 
Roman government failed, and before the Roman 
missionaries, who restored the province to civilisa- 
tion, had landed. 

We may then arrive at a conclusion and know 
what that Britain was to which the Faith returned 
with St. Augustine. When we know that, we 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 189 

shall know what Britain continued to be until the 
catastrophe of the Eeformation. 

I say that, apart from the direct evidence of 
St. Gildas and the late but respectable traditions 
gathered by the Venerable Bede, the use of other 
and indirect forms of evidence permits us to be 
certain of one or two main facts, and a method 
about to be described will enable us to add to 
these a half-dozen more ; the whole may not be 
sufficient, indeed, to give us a general picture of 
the time, but it will prevent us from falling into 
any radical error with regard to the place of 
Britain in the future unity of Europe when we 
come to examine that unity as it re-arose in the 
Middle Ages, partly preserved, partly reconstituted, 
by the Catholic Church. 

The historical method to which I allude and to 
which I will now introduce the reader may properly 
be called that of limitations. 

We may not know what happened between two 
dates, but if we know pretty well how things 
stood for some time before the earlier date and for 
some time after the later one, then we have two 
" jumping-off places," as it were, from which to 
build our bridge of speculation and deduction as 
to what happened in the unexplored gap of time 
between. 

Suppose every record oi what happened in the 
United States between 1862 and 1880 to be wiped 



190 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

out by the destruction of all but one. insufficient 
document, and supposing a fairly full knowledge 
to survive of the period between the Declaration of 
Independence and 1862, and a tolerable record to 
survive of the period between 1880 and the present 
year. Further, let there be ample traditional 
memory and legend that a civil war took place, 
that the struggle was a struggle between North 
and South, and that its direct and violent financial 
and political effects were felt for over a decade. 

The student hampered by the absence of direct 
evidence might make many errors in detail and 
might be led to assert as probably true things 
at which a contemporary would smile. But by 
analogy with other contemporary countries, by the 
use of his common sense and his knowledge of 
human nature, of local climate, of other physical 
conditions, and of the motives common to all men, 
he would arrive at a dozen or so general conclusions 
which would be just. What came after the gap 
would correct the deductions he had made from his 
knowledge of what came before it. What came 
before the gap would help to correct false deductions 
drawn from what came after it. His knowledge 
of contemporary life in Europe, let us say, or in 
western territories which the war did not reach, 
between 1862 and 1880, would further correct his 
conclusions. 

If he were to confine himself to the most 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 191 

general conclusions he could not be far wrong. 
He would appreciate the success of the North and 
how much that success was due to numbers. He 
would be puzzled perhaps by the different position 
of the abolitionist theory before and after the war ; 
but he would know that the slaves were freed in 
the interval and he would rightly conclude that 
their freedom had been a direct historical conse- 
quence and contemporary effect of the struggle. 
He would be equally right in rejecting any theory 
of the colonisation of the Southern States by 
Northerners ; he would note the continuity of 
certain institutions, the non-continuity of others. 
In general, if he were to state first what he was 
sure of, secondly what he could fairly guess, his 
brief summary, though very incomplete, would not 
be off the rails of history ; he would not be 
employing such a method to produce historical 
nonsense, as so many of our modern historians 
have done in their desire to prove the English 
people German and barbaric in their origins. 

This much being said, let me carefully set down 
what we know with regard to Britain before and 
after the bad gap in our records, the unknown one 
hundred and fifty years between the departure of 
St. Germanus and the arrival of St. Augustine. 

We know that before the bulk of Roman regulars 
left the country in 410, Britain was an organised 
Roman province. Therefore we know that it had 



192 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

regular divisions, with a town as the centre of each, 
many of the towns forming the Sees of the Bishops. 
We know that official records were kept in Latin 
and that Latin was the official tongue. We further 
know that the island at this time had for genera- 
tions past suffered from incursions of Northern 
Barbarians in great numbers over the Scottish 
border, and from piratical raids of seafarers (some 
Irish, others Germanic, Dutch, and Danish origin) 
in much lesser numbers, for the amount of men 
and provisions conveyable across a wide sea in 
small boats is highly limited. 

Within four years of the end of the sixth century, 
nearly two hundred years after the cessation of 
regular Roman government, missionary priests from 
the Continent, acting on a Roman episcopal com- 
mission, land in Britain ; from that moment writing 
returns and our chronicles begin again. What do 
they tell us ? 

First, that the whole island is by that time 
broken up into a number of small and warring- 
districts. Secondly, that these numerous little 
districts, each under its petty king or prince, fall 
into two divisions : some of these petty kings and 
courts are evidently Christian, Celtic-speaking, and 
by all their corporate tradition inherit from the old 
Roman civilisation. The other petty kings and 
courts speak various " Teutonic " dialects, that is, 
dialects made up of a jargon of original German 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 193 

words and Latin words mixed. The population of 
the little settlements under these eastern chiefs 
spoke, apparently, for the most part the same 
dialects as their courts. Thirdly, we find that 
these courts and their subjects are not only mainly 
of this speech, but also, in the mass, pagan. There 
may have been relics of Catholicism among them, 
but at any rate the tiny courts and petty kinglets 
were pagan and " Teutonic " in speech. Fourthly, 
the divisions between these two kinds of little 
states were such that the decayed Christians were, 
when St. Augustine came, roughly speaking in the 
west and centre of the island, the pagans on the 
coasts of the south and the east. 

All this tallies with the old and distorted legends 
and traditions, as it does with the direct story of 
Gildas, and also with whatever of real history may 
survive in the careful compilation of legend and 
tradition made by the Venerable Bede. 

The first definite historical truth which we 

derive from this use of the method of limitations 

is of the same sort as that to which the direct 

evidence of G-ildas leads us. A series of settlements 

had been effected upon the coasts of the North Sea 

and the eastern part of the Channel from, let us 

say, Dorsetshire or its neighbourhood, right, up to 

the Firth of Forth. They had been effected by the 

North Sea pirates and their foothold was good. 

Now let us use this method of limitations for 

o 



194 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

matters a little less obvious, and ask, first, what 
were the limits between these two main groups of 
little confused and warring districts ; secondly, how 
far was either group coherent ; thirdly, what had 
survived in either group of the old order ; and, 
fourthly, what novel thing had appeared during 
the darkness of this century and a half or two 
centuries. 1 

Taking these four points seriatim : 

(1) Further inland than about a day's march 
from the sea or from the estuaries of rivers, we have 
no proof of the settlement of the pirates or the 
formation by them of local governments. It is 
impossible to fix the boundaries in such a chaos, 
but we know that most of the county of Kent, and 
the seacoast of Sussex, also all within a raiding 
distance of Southampton Water, and of the Hamp- 
shire Avon, the maritime part of East Anglia and 
of Lincolnshire, so far as we can judge, the East 
Riding of Yorkshire, Durham, the coastal part at 
least of Northumberland and the Lothians, were 
under numerous pagan kinglets, whose courts talked 
this mixture of German and Latin words called 
"Teutonic Dialects." 

What of the Midlands ? The region was a welter, 
and a welter of which we can tell very little indeed. 

1 A century and a half from the very last Roman evidence, the A-isit 
of St. Germanus in 447 to the landing of St. Augustine exactly 150 years 
later (597) ; nearly two centuries from the withdrawal of the expedition- 
ary Roman Army to the landing of St. Augustine (410-597). 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 195 

It formed a sort of march or borderland between 
the two kinds of courts — those of the kinglets and 
chieftains who still preserved a tradition of civili- 
sation, and those of the kinglets who had lost 
that tradition. This mixed borderland tended 
apparently to coalesce (the facts on which we have 
to judge are very few) under one chief. It was 
later known not under a Germanic or Celtic name 
but under the low Latin name of " Mercia," that 
is, the " Borderland." To the political aspect 
of this line of demarcation I will return in a 
moment. 

(2) As to the second question : What kind of 
cohesion was there between the western or the 
eastern sets of these vague and petty governments? 
The answer is that the cohesion was of the loosest 
in either case. Certain fundamental habits differ- 
entiated east from west, language, for instance, 
and, much more, religion. Before the coming of 
St. Augustine, all the western and probably most 
of the central kinglets were Christian ; the kinglets 
on the eastern coasts pagan. 

There was a tendency in the west apparently 
to hold together for common interests but no 
longer to speak of one head. But note this in- 
teresting point. The west that felt some sort of 
common bond called itself the Cymry and only 
concerned the mountain-land. It did not include, 
it carefully distinguished itself from, the Christians 



196 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of the more fertile Midlands and south and east, 
which it called " Logrians." 

Along the east coast there was a sort of tradition 
of common headship, very nebulous indeed but 
existent. Men talked of " chiefs of Britain," 
" Bretwaldas," a word the first part of which is 
obviously Roman, the second part of which may be 
Germanic or Celtic or anything, and which we may 
guess to indicate titular headship. But — and this 
must be especially noted — there was no conscious 
or visible cohesion ; among the little courts of the 
east and south-east coasts there was no conscious 
and deliberate continued pagan attack against the 
western Christians as such in the end of the sixth 
century when St. Augustine landed, and no western 
Celtic Christian resistance, organised as such, to 
the chieftains scattered along the eastern coast. 
Each kinglet fought with each, pagan with pagan, 
Christian with Christian, Christian and pagan in 
alliance against pagan and Christian in alliance ; — 
and the cross divisions were innumerable. You 
have petty kings on the eastern and southern 
coasts with Celtic names ; you have Saxon allies 
in Celtic courts. You have western Christian 
kings winning battles on the coasts of the North 
Sea and eastern kings winning battles nearly as 
far west as the Severn, etc., etc. 

I have said that it is of capital importance to 
appreciate this point — that the whole thing was a 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 197 

chaos of little independent districts all fighting in 
a hotchpotch and not a clash of warring races or 
tongues. 

It is difficult for us with our modern experience 
of great and highly conscious nations to conceive 
such a state of affairs. When we think of fighting 
and war, we cannot but think of one considerable 
conscious nation fighting against another similar 
nation, and this modern habit of mind has misled 
the past upon the nature of Britain at the moment 
when civilisation re-entered the south and east of 
the island with St. Augustine. Maps are published 
with guesswork boundaries showing the "frontiers " 
of the " Anglo-Saxon conquest " at definite dates, 
and modern historians are fond of talking of the 
" limits " of that conquest being " extended " to 
such and such points. There were no "frontiers " : 
there was no " conquest" either way — of east over 
west or west over east. There were no " extending 
limits " of eastern (or of western) rule. There was 
no "advance to Chester"; no "conquest of the 
district of Bath." There were battles near Bath 
and battles near Chester, the loot of a city, a 
counter-raid by the westerners, and all the rest of 
it. But to talk of a gradual " Anglo - Saxon 
Conquest " is an anachronism. 

The men of the time would not have understood 
such a language, for indeed it has no relation to 
the facts of the time. 



198 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The kinglet who could gather his men from a 
day's march round his court in the lower Thames 
valley, fought against the kinglet who could gather 
his men from a day's march round his stronghold 
at Canterbury. A pagan Teutonic-speaking eastern 
kinglet would be found allied with a Christian 
Celtic-speaking western kinglet and his Christian 
followers ; and the allies would march indifferently 
against another Christian or another pagan. 

There was indeed later a westward movement 
in language and habit which I shall mention : that 
was the work of the Church. So far as warfare 
goes there was no movement westward or eastward. 
Fighting went on continually in all directions, from 
a hundred separate centres, and if there are reliable 
traditions of an eastern pagan kinglet, commanding 
some mixed host, once reaching so far west as to 
raid the valley of the Wiltshire Avon and another 
raiding to the Dee, so there are historical records 
of a western Christian kinglet reaching and raiding 
the eastern settlements right down to the North 
Sea at Bamborough. 

(3) Now to the third point : What had survived 
of the old order in either half of this anarchy 1 Of 
Roman government, of Roman order, of true Roman 
civilisation, of that palatium of which we spoke in 
a previous article, nothing had anywhere survived. 
The disappearance of the Roman taxing and judicial 
machinery is the mark of Britain's great wound. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 199 

It differentiates the fate of Britain from that of 
Gaul. 

The west of Britain had lost this Roman 
tradition of government just as much as the east. 
The Pict and Scot 1 and the North Sea pirates, 
since they could not read or write, or build or 
make a road or do anything appreciably useful — 
interrupted civilised life and so starved it. The 
raids did more to break up the old Roman society 
than did internal decay. The western chieftains 
who retained the Roman religion had thoroughly 
lost the Roman organisation of society before the 
year 600. The Roman language (probably only 
really familiar in the towns) seems to have gone ; 
the Roman method of building had certainly gone. 
In the west the learned could still write, but they 
must have done so most sparingly if we are to 
judge by the absence of any remains. The Church 
in some truncated and starved form survived 
indeed in the west ; it was the religion to which an 
Imperial fragment cut off from all other Roman 
populations might be expected to cling. Paganism 
seems to have died out in the west ; but the 
mutilated Catholicism that had taken its place 
became provincial, ill-instructed, and out of touch 
with Europe. We may guess, though it is only 

1 The "Scots"— that is, the Irish— were, of course, of a higher 
civilisation than the other raiders of Britain during this dark time. 
The Catholic Church reached them early. They had letters and the 
rest long before Augustine came to Britain. 



200 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

guesswork, that its chief aliment came from the 
spiritual fervour, ill-disciplined but vivid, of 
Brittany and of Ireland. 

What had survived in the eastern part of 
Britain — on the coasts, and up the estuaries of 
the navigable rivers ? Perhaps in patches the 
original language. It is a question whether 
Germanic dialects had not been known in eastern 
Britain long before the departure of the Roman 
legions. But anyhow, if we suppose the main 
speech of the east to have been Celtic and Latin 
before the pirate raids, then that main speech had 
gone. So, perhaps altogether, certainly for the 
most part, had religion. So, certainly, had the 
arts — reading and writing and the rest. Oversea 
commerce had certainly dwindled, but to what 
extent we cannot tell. It is not credible that it 
wholly disappeared ; but on the other hand there 
is very little trace of connection with southern and 
eastern Britain in the sparse Continental records 
of this time. 

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the old 
bishoprics had gone. 

When St. Gregory sent St. Augustine and his 
missionaries to refound the old sees of Britain, his 
original plan of that refounding had to be wholly 
changed. He evidently had some old Imperial 
scheme before him, in which he conceived of 
London, the great city, as the Metropolis and the 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 201 

lesser towns as suffragan to its see. But facts 
were too strong for him. He had to restore the 
Church in the coasts that cut off Britain from 
Europe, and in doing so he had to deal with 
a ruin. Tradition was lost; and Britain is the 
only Roman province in which this very great 
break in the continuity of the bishoprics is to 
be discovered. 

One thing did not disappear, and that was the 
life of the towns. 

Of course, a Roman town in the sixth or seventh 
century was not what it had been in the fourth or 
fifth ; but it is remarkable that in all this wearing 
away of the old Roman structure its framework 
(which was and is municipal) remained. 

If we cast up the principal towns reappearing 
when the light of history returns to Britain with 
St. Augustine's missionaries, we find that all of 
them are Roman in origin ; what is more important, 
we find that the proportion of surviving Roman 
towns centuries later, when full records exist, is 
even larger than it is in other provinces of the 
Empire which we know to have preserved the con- 
tinuity of civilisation. Exeter (perhaps Norwich), 
Chester, Manchester, Lancaster, Carlisle, York, 
Canterbury, Lincoln, Rochester, Newcastle, Col- 
chester, Bath, Winchester, Chichester, Gloucester, 
Cirencester, Leicester, Old Salisbury, Great London 
itself — these pegs upon which the web of Roman 



202 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

civilisation was stretched — stood firm through the 
confused welter of wars between all these petty 
chieftains, North Sea pirate, Welsh and Cumbrian 
and Pennine highlander, Irish and Scotch. 

There was a slow growth of suburbs and some 
substitution of new suburban sites for old city- 
sites — as at Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol, 
Huntingdon, etc. ; it is what you find all over 
Europe. But there was no real disturbance of this 
scheme of towns until the industrial revolution 
of modern times came to diminish the almost 
immemorial importance of the Roman cities and to 
supplant their economic functions by the huge 
aggregations of the Potteries, the Midlands, south 
Lancashire, the coalfields, and the modern ports. 

The student of this main problem in European 
history, the fate of Britain, must particularly note 
the phenomenon here described. It is the capital 
point of proof that Roman Britain, though suffer- 
ing grievously from the Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and 
Irish raids, and though cut off for a time from 
civilisation, did survive. 

Those who prefer to think of England as a 
colony of barbarians in which the European life 
was destroyed have to suppress many a truth and 
to conceive many an absurdity in order to support 
their story ; but no absurdity of theirs is ivorse 
than the fiction they put forward with regard to 
the story of the English towns. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 203 

It was solemnly maintained by the Oxford 
school and its German masters that these great 
Roman towns, one after the other, were first 
utterly destroyed by the pirates of the North 
Sea, then left in ruins for generations, and then 
reoccupied through some sudden whim by the 
newcomers ! It needs no historical learning to 
laugh at such a fancy ; but historical learning 
makes it even more impossible than it is laughable. 

Certain rare towns of course decayed in the 
course of centuries : the same is true, for that 
matter, of Spain and Gaul and Italy. Some few 
here (as many in Spain, in Gaul, and in Italy) may 
have been actually destroyed in the act of war. 
There is tradition of something of the sort at 
Pevensey (the old port of Anderida in Sussex) and 
for some time a forgery lent the same distinction 
to Wroxeter under the Wrekin. A great number 
of towns again (as in every other province of the 
Empire) naturally diminished with the effect of 
time. Dorchester on the Thames, for instance, 
seems to have been a biggish place for centuries 
after the first troubles with the pirates, though 
to-day it is only a village ; but it did not decay as 
the result of war. Sundry small towns became 
smaller still, some few sank to hamlets as genera- 
tion after generation of change passed over them ; 
but we find just the same thing in Picardy, in the 
Roussillon, in Lombardy, and in Aquitaine. What 



204 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

did not happen in Britain was a subversion of the 
Roman municipal system. 

Again, the unwalled settlement outside the 
walled town often grew at the expense of the 
municipality within the walls. I have given 
Huntingdon as an example of this, and there is 
St. Albans and Cambridge. But these also have 
their parallels in every other province of the west. 
Even in distant Africa you find exactly the same 
thing. You find it in the northern suburb of 
Roman Paris itself. That suburb turns into the 
head of the mediaeval town — yet Paris is perhaps 
the best example of Roman continuity in all 
Europe. 

The seaports naturally changed in character and 
often in actual site, especially upon the flat, and 
therefore changeable, eastern shores — and that is 
exactly what you find in similar circumstances 
throughout the tidal waters of the Continent. 
There is not the shadow or the trace of any wide- 
spread destruction of the Roman towns in Britain. 
On the contrary there is, as much or more than 
elsewhere in the Empire, the obvious fact of their 
survival. 

The phenomenon is the more remarkable when 
we consider first that the names of Roman towns 
given above do not pretend to be a complete list 
(one may add immediately from memory the 
southern Dorchester, Dover, Doncaster, etc.), and, 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 205 

secondly, that we have but a most imperfect list 
remaining of the towns in Roman Britain. 

A common method among those who belittle 
the continuity of our civilisation is to deny a 
Roman origin to any town in which Roman 
remains do not happen to have been noted as 
yet by antiquarians. Even under that test we 
can be certain that Windsor, Lewes, Arundel, 
Dorking, and twenty others, were seats of Roman 
habitation, though the remaining records of the 
first four centuries tell us nothing of them. But 
in nine cases out of ten the mere absence of 
catalogued Roman remains proves nothing. The 
soil of towns is shifted and reshifted continually 
generation after generation. The antiquary is not 
stationed at every digging of a foundation, or 
sinking of a well, or laying of a drain, or paving 
of a street. His methods are of recent establish- 
ment. We have lost centuries of research, and 
even with all our modern interest in such matters 
the antiquary is not informed once in a hundred 
times of chance discoveries, unless perhaps they 
be of coins. When, moreover, we consider that 
for fifteen hundred years this turning and return- 
ing of the soil has been going on within the 
municipalities, it is ridiculous to affirm that such 
a place as Oxford, for instance — a town of im- 
portance in the later Dark Ages — had no Roman 
root simply because the modern antiquary is not 



206 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

yet possessed of any Roman remains recently 
discovered in it : there may have been no town 
here before the fifth century ; but it is unlikely. 

One further point must be noticed before we 
leave this prime matter : had there been any 
considerable destruction of the Roman towns in 
Britain, large and small, we should expect it where 
the pirate raids fell earliest and most fiercely. 
We should expect to find the towns near the east 
and the south coast to have disappeared. The 
historical truth is quite opposite. The garrison 
of Anderida indeed, and of Anderida alone 
(Pevensey), was, if we may trust a vague phrase 
written four hundred years later, massacred in 
war. But Lincoln, York, Newcastle, Colchester, 
London, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, 
Dover, Portchester, Winchester, the very principal 
examples of survival, are all of them either right 
on the eastern and southern coast or within a 
day's striking distance of it. 

As to decay, the great garrison centre of the 
Second Legion, in the heart of the country which 
the pirate raiders never reached, has sunk to be 
little Caerleon - upon - Usk, just as surely as 
Dorchester on the Thames, far away from the 
eastern coast, has decayed from a town to a 
village, and just as surely as Richborough, an 
island right on the pirate coast itself, has similarly 
decayed ! As with destruction, so with decay ; 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 207 

there is no increasing proportion as we go from 
the west eastward towards the pirate settlements. 

But the point need not be laboured. The 
supposition that the Roman towns disappeared 
is no longer tenable, and the wonder is how so 
astonishing an assertion should have lived even 
for a generation. The Roman towns survived, 
and with them, Britain, though maimed. 

(4) Now for the last question : What novel 
things had come in to Britain with this breakdown 
of the central Imperial authority in the fifth and 
sixth centuries? To answer that is of course to 
answer the chief question of all, and it is the 
most difficult of all to answer. 

I have said that presumably on the south and 
east the language was new. There were numerous 
Germanic troops permanently in Britain before 
the legions disappeared ; there was a constant 
intercourse with Germanic auxiliaries ; there were 
probably colonies, half military, half agricultural. 
Some have even thought that "Belgic" tribes, 
whether in Gaul or Britain, spoke Teutonic dialects ; 
but it is safer to believe, from the combined 
evidence of place-names and of later traditions, 
that there was a real change in the common talk 
of most men within a march of the eastern sea 
or the estuaries of its rivers. 

This change in language, if it occurred (and we 
must presume it did, though it is not absolutely 



208 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

certain, for there may have been a large amount 
of mixed German speech among the people before 
the Roman soldiers departed) — this change of 
language, I say, is the chief novel matter. The 
decay of religion means less ; for when the pirate 
raids began, though the Empire was already 
officially Christian at its heart, the Church had 
only just taken firm root in the outlying parts. 

The institutions which arose in Britain every- 
where when the central power of Rome decayed — 
the meetings of armed men to decide public affairs, 
money compensation for injuries, the organising 
of society by "hundreds," etc., were common to 
all Europe. Nothing but ignorance can regard 
them as imported into Britain (or into Ireland or 
Brittany for that matter) by the pirates of the 
North Sea. They are things native to all our 
European race when it lives simply. A little 
knowledge of Europe will teach us that there was 
nothing novel or peculiar in such customs. They 
appear universally among the Iberians as among 
the Celts, among the pure Germans beyond the 
Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians upon the 
delta of that river, and the lowlands of the Scheldt 
and the Meuse ; even among the untouched Roman 
populations. 

Everywhere you get, as the dark ages approach 
and advance, the meetings of armed men in 
council, the chieftain assisted in his government 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 209 

by such meetings, the weaponed assent or dissent 
of the great men in conference, the division of 
the land and people into " hundreds," the fine for 
murder, and all the rest of it. 

Any man who says (and most men of the last 
generation said it) that among the changes of the 
two hundred years' gap was the introduction of 
novel institutions peculiar to the Germans, is 
speaking in ignorance of the European unity and 
of that vast landscape of our civilisation which 
every true historian should, however dimly, possess. 
The same things, talked of in a mixture of Germanic 
and Latin terms between Poole Harbour and the 
Bass Rock, were talked of in Celtic terms from 
the Start to Glasgow ; the chroniclers wrote them 
down in Latin terms alone everywhere from the 
Sahara to the Grampians and from the Adriatic 
to the Atlantic. The very Basques, who were so 
soon to begin the resistance of Christendom against 
the Mohammedan in Spain, spoke of them in 
Basque terms. But the actual things — the in- 
stitutions — for which all these various Latin, 
Basque, German, and Celtic words stood (the 
blood-fine, the scale of money — reparation for 
injury, division of society into " hundreds," the 
Council advising the Chief, etc.) were much the 
same throughout the body of Europe. They will 
always reappear wherever men of our European 
race are thrown into small warring communities, 



210 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

avid of combat, jealous of independence, organised 
under a military aristocracy and reverent of 
custom. 

Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the 
Imperial measurements survived : the measure- 
ment of land, the units of money and of length 
and weight, were all Roman, and nowhere more 
than in eastern Britain during the dark ages. 

Lastly, let the reader consider the curious point 
of language. No more striking simulacrum of 
racial unity can be discovered than a common 
language or set of languages ; but it is a simula- 
crum, and a simulacrum only. It is neither a 
proof nor a product of true unity. Language 
passes from conqueror to conquered, from con- 
quered to conqueror, almost indifferently. Con- 
venience, accident, and many a mysterious force 
which the historian cannot analyse, propagate it, 
or check it. Gaul, thickly populated, organised 
by but a few garrisons of Roman soldiers and one 
army corps of occupation, learns to talk Latin 
universally, almost within living memory of the 
Roman conquest. Yet two corners of Gaul — the 
one fertile and rich, the other barren — Amorica 
and the Basque lands, never accept Latin. Africa, 
though thoroughly colonised from Italy and 
penetrated with Italian blood as Gaul never was, 
retains the Punic speech century after century, 
to the very ends of Roman rule — 700 years after 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 211 

the fall of Carthage : 400 after the end of the 
Roman Republic ! 

Spain, conquered and occupied by the 
Mohammedan, and settled in very great numbers 
by a highly civilised Oriental race, talks to-day 
a Latin only just touched by Arabic influence. 
Lombardy, Gallic in blood and with a strong 
infusion of repeated Germanic invasions (very 
much larger than ever Britain had !), has lost all 
trace of Gallic accent, even, in language, save in 
one or two Alpine valleys, and of German speech 
retains nothing but a few rare and doubtful words. 
The plain of Hungary and the Carpathian Moun- 
tains are a tessellated pavement of languages quite 
dissimilar — Mongolian, Teutonic, Latin, Slav. The 
Balkan States have, not upon their westward or 
European side, but at their extreme opposite limit, 
a population which continues the memory of the 
Empire in its speech ; and the vocabulary of the 
Rumanians is not the Greek of Byzantium, which 
civilised them, but the Latin of Rome ! 

The most implacable of Mohammedans now 
under French rule in Algiers speak, and have 
spoken for centuries, not Arabic in any form, but 
Berber ; and the same speech reappears beyond a 
wide belt of Arabic in the far desert to the south. 

The Irish, a people in permanent contrast to 
the English, yet talk in the main the English 
tongue. 



212 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

The French-Canadians, accepting political unity 
with Britain, retain their tongue and reject English. 

Look where we will, we discover in regard to 
language something as incalculable as the human 
will, and as various as human instinct. The 
deliberate attempt to impose it has nearly always 
failed. Sometimes it survives as the result of a 
deliberate policy. Sometimes it is restored as a 
piece of national protest — Bohemia is an example. 
Sometimes it " catches on " naturally and runs for 
hundreds of miles, covering the most varied peoples 
and even the most varied civilisations with a 
common veil. 

Now the Roman towns were not destroyed ; the 
original population was certainly not destroyed 
even in the few original settlements of Saxon and 
Angles in the sea and river shores of the East. 
Such civilisation as the little courts of the Pirate 
chieftains maintained was degraded Roman or it 
was nothing. But the so-called " Anglo-Saxon " 
language — the group of half-German 1 dialects 
which may have taken root before the withdrawal 
of the Roman legions in the East of Britain, and 

1 I say "half-German" lest the reader should think, by the use of the 
word "German " or "Teutonic" that the various dialects of this sort 
(including those of the North Sea Pirates) were something original, 
uninfluenced by Rome. It must always be remembered that with their 
original words and roots was mixed an equal mass of superior words 
learned from the civilised men of the south in the course of the many 
centuries during which Germans had served the Romans as slaves and in 
arms and had met their merchants. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 213 

which at any rate were well rooted there a hundred 
years after — stood ready for one of two fates. 
Either it would die out and be replaced by dialects 
half-Celtic, half-Latin in vocabulary, or it would 
spread westward. That the Teutonic dialects of 
the eastern kinglets should spread westward might 
have seemed impossible. The unlettered barbarian 
does not teach the lettered civilised man ; the 
pagan does not mould the Christian. It is the 
other way about. Yet, in point of fact that 
happened. Why ? 

Before we answer that question let us consider 
another point. Side by side with the entry of 
civilisation through the Roman missionary Priests 
in Kent, there was going on a missionary effort in 
the north of the Island of Britain, which effort was 
Irish. It had various Celtic dialects for its common 
daily medium, though it was of course Roman in 
ritual at the altar. The Celtic Missionaries, had 
they alone been in the field, would have made us 
all Celtic speaking to-day. But it was the direct 
mission from Rome that won, and this for the 
reason that it had behind it the full tide of Europe. 
Letters, order, law, building, schools, re-entered 
England through Kent — not through Northumber- 
land where the Irish were preaching. 

Even so the spread westward of a letterless and 
starved set of dialects from the little courts of the 
Eastern coasts (from Canterbury and Bamborough 



214 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

and so forth) would have been impossible but for a 
tremendous accident. 

St. Augustine, after his landing, proposed to 
the native British Bishops that they should help in 
the conversion of the little pagan kinglets and 
their courts on the Eastern coast. They would 
not. They had been cut off from Europe for so 
long that they had got warped. They refused 
communion. The peaceful Roman Mission, coming 
just at the moment when the Empire had recovered 
Italy and was fully restoring itself, was thrown 
back on the little Eastern courts. It used them. 
It backed their tongue, their arms, their tradition. 
The terms of Roman things were carefully trans- 
lated by the Priests into the Teutonic dialects of 
these courts ; the advance of civilisation under the 
Missionaries, recapturing more and more of the 
province of Britain, proceeded westward from the 
courts of the Eastern kinglets. The schools, the 
official world — all — was now turned by the weight 
of the Church against a survival of the Western 
Celtic tongues and in favour of the Eastern 
Teutonic ones. 

Once civilisation had come back by way of the 
South and East, principally through the natural 
gate of Kent and through the Straits of Dover 
which had been blocked so long, this tendency of 
the Eastern dialects to spread as the language of 
an organised clerical officialdom, and of its courts 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 215 

of law, was immediately strengthened. It soon 
and rapidly swamped all but the western hills. 
But of colonisation, of the advance of a race, there 
was none. What advanced was the Eoman organi- 
sation once more, and with it the dialects of the 
courts it now favoured. 

What we know, then, of Britain when it was 
recivilised we know through Latin terms or 
through the half-German dialects which ultimately 
and much later merge into what we call Anglo- 
Saxon. An historic King of Sussex bears a Celtic 
name ; but we read of him in the Latin, then in 
the Teutonic tongues ; and his realm, however 
feeble the proportion of over-sea blood in it, bears 
an over-sea label for its court — " the South Saxon." 

The mythical founder of Wessex bears a Celtic 
name, Cerdic : but we read of him, if not in Latin 
then in Anglo-Saxon. Not a cantref but a hundred 
is the term of social organisation in England when 
it is recivilised ; not an eglywys but a church 1 is the 
name of the building in which the new civilisation 
hears Mass. The ruler, whatever his blood or the 
blood of his subjects, is a Cynning, not a Reg or a 
Prins. His house and court are a hall, 2 not a 
plds. We get our whole picture of renovated 

1 This word "church " is a good example of what we mean by Teutonic 
dialect. It is straight from the Mediterranean. The native German 
word for a temple — if they had got so far as to have temples (for we know 
nothing of their religion) — is lost. 

2 And "hall" is again a Roman word adopted by the Germans. 



216 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Britain (after the Church is restored) coloured by 
this half-German speech. But the Britain we see 
thus coloured is not barbaric. It is a Christian 
Britain of mixed origin, of ancient municipalities 
cut off for a time by the Pirate occupation of the 
South and East, but now reunited with the one 
civilisation whose root is in Rome. 

This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel 
to-day that I must emphasise and confirm it. 

Western Europe in the sixth, seventh, and 
eighth centuries was largely indifferent to our 
modern ideas of race. Of nationality it knew 
nothing. It was concerned with the maintenance 
of the Catholic Church, especially against the outer 
Pagan. This filled the mind. This drove all the 
mastering energies of the time. The Church, that 
is, all the acts of life, but especially record and 
common culture, came back into a Britain which 
had been cut off. It reopened the gate. It was 
refused aid by the Christians whom it relieved. It 
decided for the courts of the South and East, 
taught them organisation, and carried their dialects 
with it through the Island which it gradually 
recovered for civilisation. 

We are now in a position to sum up our 
conclusions upon the matter : 

Britain, connected with the rest of civilisation 
by a narrow and precarious neck of sea-travel over 
the Straits of Dover had, in the last centuries of 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 217 

Roman rule, often furnished great armies to 
usurpers or Imperial claimants, sometimes leaving 
the island almost bare of regular troops. But 
with each return of peace these armies also had 
returned, and the rule of the central Roman 
government over Britain had been fairly continuous 
until the beginning of the fifth century. At that 
moment — in a.d. 410 — the bulk of the trained 
soldiers again left upon a foreign adventure. But 
the central rule of Rome was then breaking down : 
these regulars never returned — though many 
auxiliary troops may have remained. 

At this moment, when every province of the 
West was subject to disturbance and to the 
overrunning of barbarian bands, small but destruc- 
tive, Britain suffered like the rest. Scotch, Irish, 
and German barbarians looted her on all sides. 

These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as 
auxiliaries in the Roman fashion, may already have 
been settled in places upon the eastern coast, their 
various half-Grerman dialects may have already 
been common upon those coasts ; but at any rate, 
after the breakdown of the Roman order, detached 
communities under little local chiefs arose. The 
towns were not destroyed. Neither the slaves, 
nor, for that matter, the greater part of the free 
population fell. But wealth declined rapidly in 
the chaos as it did throughout Western Europe. 
And side by side with this ruin came the replacing 



218 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of the Roman official language by a welter of 
Celtic and of half-German dialects in a mass of 
little courts. The new official Roman religion — 
certainly at the moment of the breakdown the 
religion of a small minority — almost or wholly 
disappeared in the Eastern pirate settlements. The 
Roman language similarly disappeared in the 
many small principalities of the western part of 
the island ; they reverted to their original Celtic 
dialects. There was no boundary between the 
hotchpotch of little German-speaking territories 
on the east and the little Celtic territories on the 
west. There was no more than a vague common 
feeling of West against East or East against West ; 
all fought indiscriminately among themselves. 

After a time which could be covered by two 
long lives, during which decline had been very 
rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the East 
throughout the island, the full influence of civili- 
sation returned with the landing in 597 of St. 
Augustine and his Missionaries, sent by the Pope. 

But the little Pirate courts of the East 
happened to have settled on coasts which occupied 
the gateway into the island ; it was thus through 
them that civilisation had been cut off, and it was 
through them that civilisation came back. On 
this account : 

(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce 
under the united discipline of the Church. 



WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 219 

(2) The united British civilisation so forming 
was able to advance gradually westward across the 
island. 

(3) Though the institutions of Europe were 
much the same wherever Roman civilisation had 
existed and had declined, though the councils of 
magnates surrounding the King, the assemblies of 
armed men, the division of land and people into 
"hundreds" and the rest of it were common to 
Europe, these things ivere given, over a wider and 
wider area of Britain, eastern, half-German 
names because it was through the courts of the 
eastern kinglets that civilisation had returned. 
The kinglets of the East, as civilisation grew, were 
continually fed from the Continent, strengthened 
with the ideas, institutions, arts, and the discipline 
of the Church. Thus did they politically become 
more and more powerful, until the whole island 
except the Cornish peninsula, Wales, and the 
North-western mountains was more or less adminis- 
tered by the courts which had their roots in the 
eastern coasts and rivers, and which spoke dialects 
cognate to those beyond the North Sea ; while the 
West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed 
in political power and saw its Celtic dialects shrink 
in area. 

By the time that this old Roman province of 
Britain rearises as an ordered Christian land in 
the eighth century, its records are kept not only in 



220 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Latin but in the Court "Anglo-Saxon" dialects: 
by far the most important being that of Winchester. 
Many place-names, and the general speech of 
its inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a 
superficial, but a very vivid change, is the chief 
outward change in the slow transformation that 
has been going on in Britain for 300 years (450- 
500 to 750-800). 

Britain is reconquered for civilisation and that 
easily ; it is again an established part of the 
European unity, with the same sacraments, the 
same morals, and all those same conceptions of 
human life as bound Europe together even more 
firmly than the old central government of Rome 
had bound it. And within this unity of civilised 
Christendom England was to remain for 800 years. 



VI 

THE DARK AGES 



221 



VI 
THE DARK AGES 

So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman 
Empire (that is of European civilisation and of the 
Catholic Church with which that civilisation was 
identified) from the origins, both of the Church and 
of the Empire, to the turning-point of the fifth 
century. We have seen the character of that 
turning-point. 

There was a gradual decline in the power of the 
central monarchy, an increasing use of auxiliary 
barbarian troops in the Army upon which Roman 
society was founded, until at last (in the years 
from a.d. 400 to 500) authority, though Roman in 
every detail of its form, gradually ceased to be 
exercised from Rome or Constantinople, but fell 
imperceptibly into the hands of a number of local 
governments. We have seen that the administra- 
tion of these local governments usually devolved 
on the chief officers of the auxiliary barbarian 
troops, who were also, as a rule, their chieftains by 
some kind of inheritance. 

223 



224 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

We have seen that there was no considerable 
infiltration of barbarian blood, no " invasions " in 
our modern sense of the term — (or rather no 
successful ones) ; no blotting out of civilisation, 
still less any introduction of new institutions or 
ideas drawn from barbarism. 

The coast regions of Eastern Britain (the 
strongest example of all, for there the change was 
most severe) were reconquered for civilisation and 
for the Faith by the efforts of St. Augustine ; Africa 
was recaptured for the direct rule of the Emperor : 
so was Italy and the South of Spain. At the end 
of the seventh century that which was in the future 
to be called Christendom (and which is nothing 
more than the Roman Empire continuing though 
transformed) is again reunited. 

What followed was a whole series of generations 
in which the forms of civilisation were set and 
crystallised in a few very simple, traditional and 
easily appreciated types. The whole standard of 
Europe was lowered to the level of its funda- 
mentals, as it were. The primary arts upon which 
we depend for our food and drink, and raiment 
and shelter survived intact. The secondary arts 
reposing upon these failed and disappeared almost 
in proportion to their distance from the funda- 
mental necessities of our race. History became no 
more than a simple chronicle. Letters, in the finer 
sense, almost ceased. Four hundred years more 



THE DARK AGES 225 

were to pass before Europe was to re-awaken from 
this sort of sleep into which her spirit had retreated, 
and the passage from the full civilisation of Rome 
through this period of simple and sometimes barbar- 
ous things is properly called the Dark Ages. 

It is of great importance for any one who would 
comprehend the general story of Europe to grasp 
the nature of those half-hidden centuries. They may 
be compared to a lake into which the activities of 
the old world flowed and stirred and then were still, 
and from which in good time the activities of the 
Middle Ages, properly so-called, were again to flow. 

Again, one may compare the Dark Ages to the 
leaf-soil of a forest. They are formed by the dis- 
integration of an antique florescence. They are 
the bed from which new florescence shall spring. 

It is a curious phenomenon to consider : this 
hibernation, or sleep ; this rest of the stuff of 
Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and 
reflux of civilisation as something much more com- 
parable to a pulse than to a growth. It makes us 
remember that Rhythm which is observed in all 
forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere 
progress from simplicity to complexity which used 
to be affirmed as the main law of history. 

The contemplation of the Dark Ages affords a 
powerful criticism of that superficial theory of 
social evolution which is among the intellectual 
plagues of our own generation. Much more is the 



226 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

story of Europe like the waking and the sleeping 
of a mature man than like any indefinite increase 
in the aptitudes and powers of a growing body. 

Though the prime characteristic of the Dark 
Ages is one of recollection, and though they are 
chiefly marked by this note of Europe sinking back 
into herself, very much more must be known of 
them before we have the truth even in its most 
general form. 

I will put in the form of a category or list the 
chief points which we must bear in mind. 

In the first place the Dark Ages were a period 
of intense military action. Christendom was be- 
sieged from all around. It was held like a strong- 
hold, and in those centuries of struggle its institu- 
tions were moulded by military necessities ; so that 
Christendom has ever since had about it the quality 
of a soldier. There was one unending series of 
attacks, Pagan and Mahommedan, from the North, 
from the East, and from the South ; attacks not 
comparable to the older raids of external hordes 
eager only to enjoy civilisation within the Empire, 
small in number and yet ready to accept the faith 
and customs of Europe. The Barbarian incursions 
of the fifth and sixth centuries — at the end of 
the united Roman Empire — had been of this lesser 
kind. The mighty crises of the eighth, ninth, and 
especially the tenth centuries — of the Dark Ages — 
were a very different matter. Had the military 



THE DARK AGES 227 

institutions of Europe failed in that struggle, our 
civilisation would have been wiped out ; and indeed 
at one or two critical points, as in the middle of 
the eighth against the Mahommedan, and at the 
end of the ninth century against the Northern 
pirates, all human judgement would have decided 
that Europe was doomed. 

In point of fact, as we shall see in a moment, 
Europe was just barely saved. It was saved by 
the sword and by the intense Christian ideal which 
nerved the sword arm. But it was only just barely 
saved. 

The first assault came from Islam. 

A new, intense, and vividly Anti-Christian thing 
arose in a moment, as it were out of nothing, out 
of the hot sands to the East, and spread like a fire. 
It consumed all the Levant. It arrived at the 
doors of the West. This was no mere rush of 
barbarism. The Mahommedan world was as 
cultured as our own in its first expansion. It 
maintained a higher and an increasing culture 
while ours declined ; and its conquest, where it 
conquered us, was the conquest of something 
materially superior for the moment over the re- 
maining arts and traditions of Christian Europe. 

Just at the moment when Britain was finally 
won back to Europe, and when the unity of the 
West seemed to be recovered (though its life had 
fallen to so much lower a plane), we lost North 



228 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Africa ; it was swept from end to end in one tidal 
rush by that new force which aimed fiercely at our 
destruction. Immediately afterwards the first 
Mahommedan force crossed the Straits of Gibraltar ; 
and in a few months after its landing, the whole of 
the Spanish Peninsula, that strong rock, as it had 
seemed of ancient Roman culture, crumbled, politic- 
ally at least, and right up to the Pyrenees Asia 
had it in its grip. In the mountain valleys alone, 
and especially in the tangle of highlands which 
occupies the north-western corner of the Spanish 
square, individual communities of soldiers held out. 
From these the gradual re-conquest of Spain by 
Christendom was to proceed, but for the moment 
they were crowded and penned upon the Asturian 
hills like men fighting against a wall. 

Even Gaul was threatened; a Mahommedan 
host poured up into its very centre far beyond 
Poitiers, half-way to Tours. Luckily it was 
defeated ; but Moslem garrisons continued to hold 
out in the southern districts, in the northern 
fringes of the Pyrenees, and along the shore line of 
the Narbonese and Provence. 

Southern Italy was raided and partly occupied. 
The islands of the Mediterranean fell. 

Against this sudden successful spring which had 
lopped off half of the West, the Dark Ages, and 
especially the French of the Dark Ages, spent a 
great part of their military energy. The knights 



THE DARK AGES 229 

of northern Spain and the chiefs of the un- 
conquered valleys recruited their forces perpetually 
from Gaul beyond the Pyrenees ; and the northern 
valley of the Ebro, the high plains of Castile and 
Leon were the training ground of European valour 
for three hundred years. The Basques were the 
unyielding basis of all the advance. 

This Mahommedan swoop was the first and most 
disastrously successful of the three great assaults. 

Next came the Scandinavian pirates. 

Their descent was a purely barbaric thing, not 
numerous, but (since pirates can destroy much 
with small numbers) for centuries unexhausted. 
They harried all the rivers and coasts of Britain, of 
Gaul, and of the Netherlands. They appeared in 
the Southern Seas, and their effort seemed in- 
defatigable. Britain especially (where the raiders 
bore the local name of " Danes ") suffered from a 
ceaseless pillage, and these new enemies had no 
attraction to the Roman land save loot. They 
merely destroyed. They refused our religion. 
Had they succeeded they would not have mingled 
with us but would have ended us. 

Both in northern Gaul and in Britain their chief- 
tains acquired something of a foothold, but only 
after the perilous moment in which their armies 
were checked; they were tamed and constrained 
to accept the society which they had attacked. - 

This critical moment when Europe seemed 



230 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

doomed was the last generation of the ninth 
century. France had been harried up to the 
gates of Paris. Britain was so raided that its last 
independent king, Alfred, was in hiding. 

Both in Britain and Gaul Christendom triumphed, 
and in the same generation. 

Paris stood a successful siege, and the family 
which defended it was destined to become the 
royal family of all France at the inception of the 
Middle Ages. Alfred of Wessex in the same decade 
recovered south England. In both provinces of 
Christendom the situation was saved. The chiefs 
of the pirates were baptized ; and though NortWr 
barbarism remained a material menace fed? 
hundred years, there was no further dang* r ! 
destruction. &$' i - 

Finally, less noticed W'^iyyOry but-aquib. 
grievous and needing a "defence as^v-^.int, Was the 
Pagan advance over the North German Plain^nu 
up the valley of the Danube. 

All the frontier of Christendom upon this line 
from Augsburg and the Lech to t] course of the 
Elbe and the North Sea was but a line of fortresses 
and continual battlefields. It was but recently 
organised land. Until the generations before the 
year 800 there was no civilisation beyond the 
Rhine save the upper Danube partially reclaimed 
and a very scanty single extension up the valley of 
the lower Maine. 



THE DARK AGES 231 

But Charlemagne with vast Gallic armies broke 
into the barbaric Germanies right up to the Elbe. 
He compelled them by arms to accept religion, 
letters, and arts. He extended Europe to those 
new boundaries and organised them as a sort of 
rampart in the East — a thing the Pagan-Roman 
Empire had not doue. 

The Church was the cement of this new belt of 
defence — the imperfect populations of which were 
evangelised from Ireland and Britain. It was an 
experiment, this creation of the Germanies by 
Western culture, this spiritual colonisation of a 
~*/[arch beyond the limits of the Empire. It did 
"'etely succeed, as the Reformation proves ; 
^d at least the strength in the century 
after Charlerr its founder, to withstand the 

I& o^rn, attack uy jxi ^.ristendom. 

The attack was not racial. It was Pagan- Slav 
Mixed with much that was left of Pagan-German, 
even Mongol. Its character was the advance of 
the savage, gainst the civilised man, and it 
remained a pcsil two generations longer than the 
peril which Gaul and Britain had staved off from 
the North. 

This, then, is the first characteristic to be 
remembered of the Dark Ages : the violence of the 
physical struggle, and the intense physical effort 
by which Europe was saved. 

The second characteristic of the Dark Ages 



232 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

proceeds from this first military one : it may be 
called Feudalism. 

Briefly it was this : the passing of actual 
government from the hands of the old Roman 
provincial centres of administration into the hands 
of each small local society and its lord. On such a 
basis there was a reconstruction of society from 
below : these local lords associating themselves 
under greater men, and these again holding 
together in great national groups under a national 
overlord. 

In the violence of the struggle through which 
Christendom passed, town and village, valley and 
castle, had often to defend itself alone. 

The great Roman landed estates, with their 
masses of dependents and slaves, under a lord or 
owner, had never disappeared. The descendants 
of these Roman, Gallic, British owners formed the 
fighting Class of the Dark Ages, and in this new 
function of theirs, perpetually lifted up to be the 
sole depositories of authority in some small im- 
perilled countryside, they grew to be nearly 
independent units. For the purposes of cohesion, 
that family which possessed most estates in a 
district tended to become the leader of it. Whole 
provinces were thus formed and grouped, and the 
vaguer sentiments of a larger unity expressed 
themselves by the choice of some one family, one 
of the most powerful in every country, who would 



THE DARK AGES 233 

be the overlord of all the other lords, great and 
small. 

Side by side with this growth of local independ- 
ence and of voluntary local groupings went the 
transformation of the old, Imperial, nominated 
offices into hereditary and personal things. 

A " count," for instance, was originally a 
" comes " or " companion " of the Emperor. The 
word dates from long before the break-up of the 
central authority of Rome. A count later was a 
great official ; a local governor and judge — the 
viceroy of a large district (a French county and 
English shire). His office was revocable like other 
official appointments. He was appointed for a 
season, first at the Emperor's, later at the local 
King's discretion, to a particular local government. 
In the Dark Ages the count becomes hereditary. 
He thinks of his government as a possession which 
his son should rightly have after him. He bases 
his right to his government upon the possession of 
great estates within the area of that government. 
In a word, he comes to think of himself not as an 
official at all but as a feudal * overlord, and all 
society (and the remaining shadow of central 
authority itself) agrees with him. 

The second note then of the Dark Ages is the 
gradual transition of Christian Society from a 
number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors, 
taxed and administered by a regular government, 



234 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

to a society of fighting nobles and their descendants, 
organised upon a basis of independence and in a 
hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no 
longer by slaves in the villages but by half-free 
serfs or " villeins" 

Later an elaborate theory was constructed in 
order to rationalise this living and real thing. It 
was pretended — by a legal fiction — that the central 
King owned nearly all the land, that the great 
overlords " held " their land of him, the lesser lords 
" holding " theirs hereditarily of the overlords, and 
so forth. This idea of "holding" instead of 
" owning," though it gave an easy machinery for 
confiscation in time of rebellion, was legal theory 
only, and, so far as men's views of property went, 
a mere form. The reality was what I have 
described. 

The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was 
the curious fixity of morals, of traditions, of the 
forms of religion, and of all that makes up social 
life. 

We may presume that all civilisation originally 
sprang from a soil in which custom was equally 
permanent. 

We know that in the great civilisations of the 
East an enduring fixity of form is normal. 

But in the general history of Europe it has been 
otherwise. There has been a perpetual flux in the 
outward form of things, in architecture, in dress, 



THE DAEK AGES 235 

and in the statement of philosophy as well (though 
not in its fundamentals). 

In this mobile surface of European history the 
Dark Ages form a sort of island of changelessness. 
There is an absence of any great heresies in the 
West, and, save in one or two names, an absence 
of speculation. It was as though men had no time 
for any other activity but the ceaseless business of 
arms and of the defence of the West. 

Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the 
central figure of those centuries. It is spent 
almost entirely in the saddle. One season finds him 
upon the Elbe, the next upon the Pyrenees. One 
Christmas he celebrates in northern Gaul, another 
in Eome. The whole story is one of perpetual 
marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting 
there, upon all the boundaries of isolated and 
besieged Christendom. He will attend to learning, 
but the idea of learning is repetitive and con- 
servative : its passion is to hold what was, not to 
create and expand. An anxious and sometimes 
desperate determination to preserve the memory of 
a great but half-forgotten past is the business of 
his court, which dissolves just before the worst of 
the Pagan assault ; as it is the business of Alfred 
who arises a century later, just after the worst 
assault has been finally repelled. 

Religion during these centuries settled and 
consolidated as it were. An enemy would say 



236 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

that it petrified ; a friend that it was enormously 
strengthened by pressure. But whatever the 
metaphor chosen, the truth indicated will be this : 
that the Catholic Faith became between the years 
600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last 
vestiges of the antique and Pagan civilisation of 
the Mediterranean were absorbed. A habit of 
certitude and of fixity even in the details of 
thought was formed in the European mind. 

It is to be noted in this connection that 
geographically the centre of things had somewhat 
shifted. With the loss of Spain and of northern 
Africa, the Mahommedan raiding of southern Italy 
and the islands, the Mediterranean was no longer a 
vehicle of Western civilisation but the frontier of 
it. Rome itself might now be regarded as a 
frontier town. The eruption of the Barbarians 
from the East along the Danu> x±ad singularly cut 
off the Latin West from Constantinople and from 
all the high culture of its Empire. Therefore, the 
centre of that which resisted in the West, the 
geographical nucleus of the island of Christendom, 
which was besieged all round, was France ; and in 
particular northern France. Northern Italy, the 
Germanies, the Pyrenees, and the upper valley of 
Ebro were essentially the marches of Gaul. Gaul 
was to preserve all that could be preserved of the 
material side of Europe, and also of the European 
spirit. And therefore the New World, when it 



THE DARK AGES 237 

arose, with its Gothic Architecture, its Parliaments, 
its Universities, and, in general, its spring of the 
Middle Ages, was to be a Gallic thing. 

The fourth characteristic of the Dark Ages was 
a material one, and was that which would strike 
our eyes most immediately, if we could transfer 
ourselves in time, and enjoy a physical impression 
of that world. This characteristic was derived 
from what I have just been saying. It was the 
material counterpart of the moral inactivity or 
steadfastness of the time. It was this : that the 
external forms of things stood quite unchanged. 
The semi - circular arch, the short stout pillar, 
occasionally (but rarely) the dome : these were 
everywhere the mark of architecture. There was 
no change nor any attempt at change. The arts 
were saved but nj®b increased, and the whole of the 
work that men uLocwith their hands stood fast in 
mere tradition. No new town arises. If one is 
mentioned (Oxford, for instance) for the first time 
in the Dark Ages, whether in Britain or in Gaul, 
one may fairly presume a Roman origin for it, even 
though there be no actual mention of it handed 
down from Roman times. 

No new roads were laid. The old Roman 
military system of highways was kept up and 
repaired, though kept up and repaired with a 
declining vigour. The wheel of European life had 
settled to one slow rate of turning. 



238 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Not only were all these forms enduring, they 
were also few and simple. One type of public 
building and of church, one type of writing, 
everywhere recognisable, one type of agriculture, 
with very few products to differentiate it, alone 
remained. 

The fifth characteristic of the Dark Ages is one 
apparently, but only apparently, contradictory of 
that immobile and fundamental character which I 
have just been describing. It is this : the Dark 
Ages were the point during which there very 
gradually germinated and came into outward 
existence things which still remain among us and 
help to differentiate our Christendom from the 
past of classical antiquity. 

This is true of certain material things : the 
spur, the double bridle, the stirrup, the book in 
leaves distinct from the old roll — and very much 
else. It is true of the road system of Europe 
wherever that road system has departed from the 
old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages, with 
the gradual breakdown of expensive causeways 
over marshes, with the gradual decline of certain 
centres, with bridges left unrepaired, culverts 
choked and making a morass against the dam of 
the roads, that you got the deflection of the great 
ways. In almost every broad river valley in 
England where an old Roman road crosses the 
stream and its low - lying banks you may see 



THE DARK AGES 239 

something which the Dark Ages left to us in our 
road system : you may see the modern road leaving 
the old Roman line and picking its way across the 
wet lands from one drier point to another, and 
rejoining the Roman line beyond. It is a thing 
you will see in almost any one of our Strettons, 
Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords, etc., which every- 
where mark the crossing of a Roman 'road over a 
watercourse. 

But much more than in material things the 
Dark Ages set a mould wherein the European 
mind grew. For instance, it was they that gave 
to us two forms of legend. The one something 
older than history, older than the Roman order, 
something Western reappearing with the release of 
the mind from the rigid, accuracy of a high 
civilisation ; the other that legend which preserves 
historical truth under a guise of phantasy. 

Of the first the British story of Tristan is one 
example out of a thousand. Of the second the 
legend of Constantine, which gradually and un- 
consciously developed into the famous Donation. 

The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story 
colouring and enlivening all our European life, 
and, what is more, largely preserving historical 
truth ; for nothing is more valuable to true history 
than legend. They also gave us our order in 
speech. Great host of words unknown to an- 
tiquity sprang up naturally among the people 



240 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

when the forces of the classical centre failed. 
Some of them were words of the languages before 
the Roman Armies came — Cask, for instance, the 
old Iberian word. Some of them were the camp 
talk of the soldiers — Spade, for instance, and 
" epe\" the same piece of Greek slang, " the 
broad one," which has come to mean in French, a 
sword; in English, that with which we dig the 
earth. Masses of technical words in the old 
Roman laws turned into popular usage through 
that appetite the poor have for long official 
phrases : for instance, our English words wild, 
weald, wold, waste, gain, rider, rode, say, 
and a thousand others, all branch out from the 
lawyers' phrases of the later Roman Empire. 

In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages 
crystallised also — by a process which we cannot 
watch, or of which we have but glimpses — that 
rich mass of jewels, the local customs of Europe 
and even the local dress, which differentiates one 
place from another when the communications of a 
high material civilisation break down. In all this 
the Dark Ages are a comfort to the modern man, 
for he sees by their example that the process of 
increasing complexity reaches its term ; that the 
strain of development is at last relieved ; that 
humanity sooner or later returns upon itself; that 
there is an end in repose and that the repose is 
fruitful. 



THE DAEK AGES 241 

The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that 
which has most engrossed, puzzled, and warped the 
judgement of non-Catholic historians when they 
have attempted a conspectus of European develop- 
ment ; it was the segregation, the homogeneity, 
and the dominance of clerical organisation. 

The hierarchy of the Church, its unity and its 
sense of discipline, was the chief civil institution 
and the chief binding social force of the times. 
Side by side with it went the establishment of the 
monastic institution, which everywhere took on a 
separate life of its own, preserved what could be 
preserved of arts and letters, drained the marshes 
and cleared the forests, and formed the ideal 
economic unit for such a period : almost the only 
economic unit in which capital could then be 
accumulated and preserved. The great order of 
St. Benedict formed a framework of living points 
on which was stretched the moral life of Europe. 
The vast and increasing endowments of great and 
fixed religious houses formed the economic fly- 
wheel of those centuries. They were the granary 
and the storehouse. But for the monks the 
fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline 
would, in their violence, at some point or another 
have snapped the chain of economic tradition, and 
we should all have fallen into barbarism. 

Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institu- 
tion — I have already called it by a violent metaphor 

R 



242 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

a civil institution — at any rate as a political in- 
stitution — remained absolute above the social 
disintegration of the time. 

All natural things were slowly growing up 
unchecked and disturbing the strict lines of the old 
centralised governmental order which men still 
remembered. In language Europe was a medley of 
infinitely varying local dialects. 

Thousands upon thousands of local customs 
were coming to be separate laws in each separate 
village. 

Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed 
history. The tribal basis from which we spring 
was thrusting its instincts back into the strict and 
rational Latin fabric of the State. Status was 
everywhere replacing contract, and habit replacing 
a reason for things. Above this medley the only 
absolute organisation that could be was that of the 
Church. The Papacy was the one centre whose 
shifting could not even be imagined. The Latin 
tongue, in the late form in which the Church used 
it, was everywhere the same, and everywhere 
suited to rituals that differed but slightly from 
province to province, when we contrast them with 
the millioned diversity of local habit and speech. 

Whenever a high civilisation was to re -arise 
out of the soil of the Dark Ages, it was certain 
first to show a full organisation of the Church 
under some Pope of exceptional vigour, and next 



THE DARK AGES 243 

to show that Pope, or his successors in this 
tradition, at issue with new civil powers. When 
ever central government should rise again, and in 
whatever form, a conflict would begin between the 
new kings and the clerical organisation which had 
so strengthened itself during the Dark Ages. 

Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its 
long sleep. The eleventh century was the moment 
of its awakening. Three great forces — the person- 
ality of St. Gregory VII., the appearance (by a 
happy accident of slight cross-breeding — a touch 
of Scandinavian blood added to the French strain) 
of the Norman race, finally the Crusades — drew 
out of the darkness the enormous vigour of the 
early Middle Ages. They were to produce an 
intense and active civilisation of their own : a 
civilisation which was undoubtedly the highest and 
the best our race has known, conformable to the 
instincts of the European, fulfilling his nature, 
giving him that happiness which is the end of man. 

As we also know, Europe, on this great 
experiment of the Middle Ages, after four hundred 
years of high vitality, was rising to still greater 
heights when it suffered shipwreck. 

With that disaster, the disaster of the Reforma- 
tion, I shall deal later in this series. 

In my next chapter I shall describe the 
inception of the Middle Ages, and show what they 
were before our promise in them was ruined. 



VII 

THE MIDDLE AGES 



245 



VII 
THE MIDDLE AGES 

I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages 
might be compared to a long sleep of Europe : a 
sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old society in 
the fifth century to the spring and rising of the 
eleventh and twelfth. The metaphor is far too 
simple, of course, for that sleep was a sleep of war ; 
and in all those centuries Europe was desperately 
holding its own against the attack of all that desired 
to destroy it : refined and ardent Islam from the 
South, letterless barbarian pagans from the East 
and North. At any rate from that sleep or that 
besieging Europe awoke or was relieved. 

I said that three great forces, humanly speak- 
ing, worked this miracle : the personality of St. 
Gregory VII. ; the brief appearance, by a happy 
accident, of the Norman State ; and finally the 
Crusades. 

The Normans of history, the true French 
Normans we know, are stirring a generation after 
the year 1000. St. Gregory filled that same 

247 



248 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

generation. He was a young man when the Norman 
effort began. He died, full of an enormous achieve- 
ment, in 1085. As much as one man could, he, 
the heir of Cluny, had re-made Europe. Immedi- 
ately after his death there was heard the march of 
the Crusades. From these three the vigour of a 
fresh, young, renewed Europe proceeds. 

Much might be added. The perpetual and suc- 
cessful chivalric charge against the Mahommedan 
in Spain illumined all that time and clarified it. 
Asia was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and 
through the passes of the Pyrenees perpetually 
cavalcaded the high adventurers of Christendom. 
The Basques — a strange and very strong small 
people — were the pivot of that reconquest, but the 
valley of the torrent of Aragon was its channel. 
The life of St. Gregory is contemporaneous with 
that of El Cid Campeador. In the same year that 
St. Gregory died, Toledo, the sacred centre of 
Spain, was at last forced from the Mahommedans 
and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All 
southern Europe was alive with the sword. 

In that same moment romance appeared ; the 
great songs — the greatest of them all, the Song of 
Roland ; then was a ferment of the European mind, 
eager from its long repose, piercing into the un- 
discovered fields. That watching scepticism which 
flanks and follows the march of the Faith when the 
Faith is most vigorous had also begun to speak. 



THE MIDDLE AGES 249 

There was even some expansion beyond the 
boundaries eastward, so that something of the un- 
fruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke 
and Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human 
exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas, was to appear. 
The plastic arts leapt up, Colour and Stone. 
Humour fully returned ; wide travel ; vision. In 
general, the moment was one of expectation and 
of advance. It was spring. 

For the purpose of these few pages I must 
confine the attention of my reader to those three 
tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I 
have said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., 
and the Crusades. 

Of the Norman race we may say that it re- 
sembled in history those mirae or New Stars which 
flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for 
some few hours, or weeks, or years, and then are 
lost or merged in the infinity of things. He is 
indeed unhistorical who would pretend William 
the Conqueror, the organiser and maker of what 
we now call England, Robert the Wizard, the 
conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman 
names that light Europe in the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries, to be even partly Scandinavians. They 
were Gauls : short in stature, lucid in design, 
vigorous in stroke, positive in philosophy. They 
bore no outward relation to the soft and tall 
and sentimental North from which some few 



250 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral 
names. 

But, on the other hand, any one who should pre- 
tend that this amazing and ephemeral phenomenon, 
the Norman, was merely Gallo - Roman, would 
commit an error : an error far less gross but still 
misleading. In speech, in manner, in accoutrement, 
in the very trick of riding the horse, in the cooking 
of food, in that most intimate part of man, his 
jests, the Norman was wholly and apparently a 
Gaul. In his body — hard, short, square, broad- 
shouldered, alert — the Norman was a Frenchman 
only. But no other part of Gaul then did w T hat 
Normandy did ; nor could any other French 
province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, 
organised, and creative power, during the few years 
that the marvel lasted. 

That marvel is capable of explanation, and I will 
attempt to explain it. Those dull, blundering, and 
murderous ravagings of the coasts of Christian 
Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (small in 
number, futile in achievement), which we call in 
English history " The Danish Invasions," were 
called upon the opposite coast of the Channel 
" The Invasions of the Nordnianni," of " The Men 
of the North." They came from the Baltic and 
from Norway. They were part of the universal 
assault which the Dark Ages of Christendom had 
to sustain : part of a ceaseless pressure from with- 



THE MIDDLE AGES 251 

out against Civilisation ; and they were but a part 
of it. They were few, as Pirates always must be. 
It was on the estuaries of a half-dozen continental 
rivers and in the British Isles that they counted 
most in the lives of Europeans. 

Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was 
the estuary of the Seine. The Scandinavian pirates 
forced it again and again. At the end of the ninth 
century they had besieged Paris, which was then 
rapidly becoming the political centre of Gaul. 

So much was there left of the Roman tradition 
in that last stronghold of the Koman Empire that 
the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement 
(by intermarriage with, and granting of land in, a 
fixed Roman province) was a policy still obvious 
to those who still called themselves " The Emperors " 
of the West. 

In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated 
by centuries of tradition, produced its last example, 
and the barbarian troublers from the sea were given 
a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. 
The maritime province " Lugdunensis Secunda " 1 
was handed over to them for settlement — that is, 
they might not attempt a partition of the land 
outside its boundaries. 

On the analogy of all similar experiments we 

1 The delimitation of this province dated from Diocletian. It was 
already 600 years old; its later name of "Normandy" masked this 
essential fact, that it was and is a Roman division, as for that matter are 
probably our English counties. 



252 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

can be fairly certain of what happened, though 
there is no contemporary record of such domestic 
details in the case of Normandy. 

The barbarians, few in number, coming into a 
fertile and thickly populated Eoman province, 
only slightly affected its blood, but their leaders 
occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs 
of existing childless lords, took to wife the heiresses 
of others ; enfeoffed groups of small men ; took a 
share of the revenue ; helped to answer for military 
levy and general government. Their chief was 
responsible to the crown. 

To the mass of the population the new arrange- 
ment would make no change ; they were no longer 
slaves, but they were still serfs. Secure of their 
small farms, but still bound to work for their lord, 
it mattered little to them whether that lord of 
theirs had married his daughter to a pirate or 
had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the 
management of the estate. All the change the 
serf would notice from the settlement was that 
the harrying and the plundering of occasional 
barbarian raids had ceased. 

In the governing class of perhaps some ten to 
twenty thousand families the difference would be 
very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers, 
though insignificant in number compared with the 
total population, were a very large fraction added 
to so small a body. The additional blood, though 



THE MIDDLE AGES 253 

numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly 
throughout the whole community. Scandinavian 
names and habits may have had at first some 
little effect upon the owner-class with which the 
Scandinavians first mingled ; it soon disappeared. 
But, as had been the case centuries before in the 
earlier experiments of that sort, it was the 
barbarian chief and his hereditary descendants 
who took over the local government and "held 
it," as the phrase went, of the universal govern- 
ment of Gaul. 

These " North-men," the new and striking 
addition to the province, the Gallo-Romans called, 
as we have seen, "Nordmanni." The Roman 
province, within the limits of which they were 
strictly settled, the second Lyonnese, came to be 
called " Normannia." For a century the slight 
admixture of new blood worked in the general 
Gallo-Roman mass of the province and, numeric- 
ally small though it was, influenced its character, 
or rather produced a new thing ; just as in certain 
chemical combinations the small admixture of a 
new element transforms the whole. With the 
beginning of the eleventh century, as everything 
was springing into new life, when the great saint 
who, from the chair of Peter, was to restore the 
Church was already born, when the advance of 
the Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to 
strike its decisive conquering blows, there appeared, 



254 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

a sudden phenomenon, this new thing — French 
in speech and habit and disposition of body, yet 
just differentiated from the rest of Frenchmen — 
the Norman Race. 

It possessed these characteristics — a great love 
of exact order, an alert military temper, and a 
passion for reality which made its building even 
of ships (though it was not in the main sea-faring) 
excellent, and of churches and of castles the most 
solid of its time. 
- All the Normans' characteristics (once the race 
was formed) led them to advance. They conquered 
England and organised it ; they conquered and 
organised Sicily and southern Italy ; they made 
of Normandy itself the model state in a confused 
time ; they surveyed land ; they developed a 
regular tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they en- 
dured for but a hundred years, and after that 
brief coruscation they are wholly merged again 
in the mass of European things ! 

You may take the first adventurous lords of 
the Cotentin in, say, 1030, for the beginning of the 
Norman thing ; you may take the court of young 
Henry II. with his southerners and his high culture 
in, say, 1160, most certainly for the burial of it. 
During that little space of time the Norman had 
not only reintroduced exactitude in the govern- 
ment of men, he had also provided the sword of 
the new Papacy, and he had furnished the frame- 



THE MIDDLE AGES 255 

work of the Crusading host. But before his 
adventure was done the French language and the 
writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the 
Euphrates. 

Of the Papacy and the Crusades I now speak. 

St. Gregory VII., the second of the great 
recreative forces of that time, was of the Tuscan 
peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian in 
speech, by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian 
understands his career or no is a very test of 
whether that historian understands the nature 
of Europe. For St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing 
upon Europe. He made nothing new. What he 
did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He 
provoked a resurrection of the flesh. He made 
corporate the centralised Church and the West. 

For instance, it was the ideal, the doctrine, the 
tradition, the major custom by far, that the clergy 
should be celibate. He enforced celibacy as 
universal discipline. 

The awful majesty of the Papacy had been 
present in all men's minds as a vast political 
conception for centuries too long to recall : St. 
Gregory organised that monarchy and gave it 
proper instruments of rule. 

The Unity of the Church had been the constant 
image without which Christendom could not be ; 
St. Gregory VII. at every point made that unity 
tangible and visible. The Protestant historians 



256 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

who, for the most part, see in the man a sporadic 
phenomenon, by such a misconception betray the 
source of their anaemia and prove their intellectual 
nourishment to be unfed from the fountain of 
European life. St. Gregory VII. was not an 
inventor, but a renovator. He worked not upon, 
but in, his material ; and his material was the 
nature of Europe : our nature. 

Of the awful obstacles such workers must en- 
counter all history speaks. They are at conflict 
not only with evil, but with inertia ; and with 
local interest, with blurred vision, and with 
restricted landscapes. Always they think them- 
selves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died. 
Always they prove themselves before posterity to 
have done much more than any other mould of 
man. Napoleon also was of this kind. 

When St. Gregory was dead the Europe which 
he left was the monument of that triumph whose 
completion he had doubted, and the fear of whose 
failure had put upon his dying lips the phrase, 
" I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore 
I die in exile." 

Immediately after his death came the stupendous 
Gallic effort of the Crusades. 

The Crusades were the second of the main armed 
eruptions of the Gauls. The first, centuries before, 
had been the Gallic invasion of Italy and Greece 
and the Mediterranean shores in the old pagan 



THE MIDDLE AGES 257 

time. The third, centuries later, was to be the 
wave of the Revolution and of Napoleon. 

The preface to the Crusades appeared in those 
endless and already successful wars of Christendom 
against Asia upon the high plateaux of Spain. 
These had taught the enthusiasm and the method 
by which Asia, for so long at high-tide flooding a 
beleaguered Europe, might be slowly repelled, and 
from these had proceeded the military science and 
the aptitude for strain which made possible the 
advance of 2000 miles upon the Holy Land. The 
consequences of this last and third factor in the 
reawakening of Europe were so many that I can 
give but a list of them here. 

The West, still primitive, discovered through the 
Crusades the intensive culture, the accumulated 
wealth, the fixed civilised traditions of the Greek 
Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It 
discovered also, in a vivid new experience, the East. 
The mere covering of so much land, the mere 
seeing of so many sights by a million men, 
expanded and broke the walls of the mind of the 
Dark Ages. 

The Mediterranean came to be covered with 
Christian ships, and took its place again with 
fertile rapidity as the great highway of exchange. 

Europe awoke. All architecture is transformed, 
and that quite new thing, the Gothic, arises. The 
conception of representative Parliaments, monastic 



258 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, 
appears in the institutions of Christendom. The 
vernacular languages appear, and with them the 
beginnings of our literature : the Tuscan, the 
Castilian, the Langue d'Oc, the Northern French, 
somewhat later the English. Even the primitive 
tongues that had always kept their vitality from 
beyond recorded time, the Celtic and the German, 1 
begin to take on new creative powers and to 
produce a new literature. That fundamental in- 
stitution of Europe, the University, arises ; first in 
Italy, immediately after in Paris — which last be- 
comes the type and centre of the scheme. 

The central civil governments begin to corre- 
spond to their natural limits ; the English monarchy 
is fixed first, the French kingdom is coalescing, the 
Spanish regions will soon combine. The Middle 
Ages are born. 

The flower of that capital experiment in the 
history of our race was the thirteenth century. 
Edward I. of England, St. Louis of France, Pope 
Innocent III. were the types of its governing 
manhood. Everywhere Europe was renewed ; 

1 I mean, in both groups of tongues as we first find them recorded, 
for by that time each — especially the German — was full of Southern 
words borrowed from the Empire ; but the original stocks only sur- 
vived side by side with this new vocabulary. For instance, our 
first knowledge of Teutonic dialect is of the eighth century (the so- 
called Early Gothic is a fraud), but even then quite half the words or 
more are truly German apparently unali'ected by the Imperial laws 
and speech. 



THE MIDDLE AGES 259 

there were new white walls around the cities, new 
white Gothic churches in the towns, new castles on 
the hills, law codified, the classics rediscovered, the 
questions of philosophy sprung to activity and 
producing in their first vigour, as it were, the 
summit of expository power in St. Thomas, surely 
the strongest, the most virile, intellect which our 
European blood has given to the world. 

Two notes mark the time for any one who is 
acquainted with its building, its letters, and its 
wars : a note of youth, and a note of content. 
Europe was imagined to be at last achieved, and 
that ineradicable dream of a permanent and 
satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh 
and to have come to live for ever among Christian 
men. 

No such permanence and no such good is per- 
mitted to humanity ; and the great experiment, as 
I have called it, was destined to fail. 

While it flourished, all that is specially character- 
istic of our European descent and nature stood 
visibly present in the daily life, and in the large as 
in the small institutions, of Europe. 

Our property in land and instruments was well 
divided among many or all ; we produced the 
peasant ; we maintained the independent crafts- 
man ; we founded co-operative industry. In arms 
that military type arose which lives upon the 
virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms 



260 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

may breed. Above all, an intense and living 
appetite for truth, a perception of reality, in- 
vigorated these generations. They saw what was 
before them, they called things by their names. 
Never was political or social formula less divorced 
from fact, never was the mass of our civilisation 
better welded . . . and in spite of all this the 
thing did not endure ! 

By the middle of the fourteenth century the 
decaying of the flower was tragically apparent. 
New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue 
successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase 
and of sophistry in philosophical argument, marked 
the turn of the tide. Not an institution of the 
thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it : the 
Papacy professional and a prisoner, the parliaments 
tending to oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed 
in the minds of the rulers, the new and vigorous 
and democratic monastic orders already touched 
with mere wealth and beginning also to change — 
but these last can always and do always restore 
themselves. 

Upon all this came the enormous incident of 
the Black Death. Here half the people, there a 
third, there again a quarter, died ; from that 
additional blow the great experiment of the 
Middle Ages could not recover. 

Men clung to their ideal for yet another 
hundred and fifty years. The vital forces it had 



THE MIDDLE AGES 261 

developed still carried Europe from one material 
perfection to another ; the art of government, the 
suggestion of letters, the technique of sculpture 
and of painting (here raised by a better vision, 
there degraded by a worse one), everywhere 
developed and grew manifold. But the supreme 
achievement of the thirteenth century was seen 
in the later fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in 
the fifteenth it was apparent that the attempt to 
found a simple and satisfied Europe had failed. 

The full causes of that failure cannot be 
analysed. One may say that science and history 
were too slight ; that the material side of life was 
insufficient ; that the full knowledge of the past 
which is necessary to permanence was lacking — 
or one may say that the ideal was too high for 
men. I, for my part, incline to believe that wills 
other than those of mortals were in combat for 
the soul of Europe, as they are in combat daily 
for the souls of individual men, and that in this 
spiritual battle, fought over our heads perpetually, 
some accident of the struggle turned it against 
us for a time. If that suggestion be fantastic 
(which no doubt it is), at any rate none other 
is complete. 

With the end of the fifteenth century there 
was to come a supreme test and temptation. The 
fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek : 
the rediscovery of the Classic past : the Press : 



262 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

the new great voyages — India to the East, America 
to the West — had (in the one lifetime of a man 1 
between 1453 and 1515) suddenly brought Europe 
into a new, a magic, and a dangerous land. 

To the provinces of Europe, shaken by an 
intellectual tempest of physical discovery, dis- 
turbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement 
in the material world, in physical science, and in 
the knowledge of antiquity, was to be offered a 
fruit of which each might taste if it would, but 
the taste of which would lead, if it were acquired, 
to evils no citizen of Europe then dreamt of; to 
things which even the criminal intrigues and the 
cruel tyrants of the fifteenth century would have 
shuddered to contemplate, and to a disaster which 
very nearly overset our ship of history and very 
nearly lost us for ever its cargo of letters, of 
philosophy, of the arts, and of all our other 
powers. 

That disaster is commonly called " The Reforma- 
tion." I do not pretend to analyse its material 
causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were wholly 
material. I rather take the shape of the event 
and show how the ancient and civilised boundaries 
of Europe stood firm, though shaken, under the 

1 The lifetime of one very great and famous man did cover it. 
Ferdinand, King of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of the 
noblest of English queens, was born the year before Constantinople fell. 
He died the year before Luther found himself swept to the head of a 
chaotic wave. 



THE MIDDLE AGES 263 

tempest ; how that tempest might have ravaged 
no more than those outlying parts newly in- 
corporated — never sufficiently penetrated perhaps 
with the Faith and the proper habits of ordered 
men — the outer Germanies and Scandinavia. 

The disaster would have been upon a scale 
not too considerable, and Europe might quickly 
have righted herself after the gust should be 
passed, had not one exception of capital account 
marked the intensest crisis of the storm. That 
exception to the resistance offered by the rest of 
ancient Europe was the defection of Britain. 

Conversely with this loss of an ancient province 
of the Empire, one nation, and one alone, of those 
which the Roman Empire had not bred, stood the 
strain and preserved the continuity of Christian 
tradition : that nation was Ireland. 



VIII 

WHAT WAS THE KEFORMATION? 



265 



VIII 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 

It is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions, 
after the original question : " What was the Church 
in the Empire of Rome ? " A true answer to this 
original question gives the nature of that capital 
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to 
maturity and attained to a full consciousness of 
itself : an answer to the other question, " What 
was the Reformation ? " begins to explain our 
modern ill-ease. 

A true answer to the question : " What was the 
Reformation ? " is of such vast importance, because 
it is only when we grasp what the Reformation 
was that we understand its consequences. Then 
only do we know how the united body of European 
civilisation has been cut asunder and by what a 
wound. The abomination of industrialism ; the 
loss of land and capital by the people in great 
districts of Europe ; the failure of modern discovery 
to serve the end of man ; the series of larger and 
still larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale 

267 



268 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of severity and destruction, till the dead are now 
counted in tens of millions ; the increasing chaos 
and misfortune of society — all these attach one to 
the other, each falls into its place, and a hundred 
smaller phenomena as well, when we appreciate — 
as to-day we can — the nature and the magnitude 
of that central catastrophe. 

It is possible that the perilous business is now 
drawing to its end and that (though those now 
living will not live to see it) Christendom may 
enter into a convalescence : may at last forget the 
fever and be restored. With that I am not here 
concerned. It is my business only to explain that 
storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago 
and within a century brought Christendom to 
shipwreck. 

The true causes are hidden — for they were 
spiritual. 

In proportion as an historical matter is of import 
to human kind, in that proportion does it spring 
not from apparent — let alone material — causes, but 
from some hidden revolution in the human spirit. 
To pretend an examination of the secret springs 
whence the human mind is fed is futile. The 
greater the affair the more directly does it proceed 
from unseen sources which the theologian may 
catalogue, the poet see in vision, the mystic ex- 
plain, but with which positive external history 
cannot deal, and which the mere historian cannot 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 269 

handle. It is the function of history to present 
the outward thing, as a witness might have seen it, 
and to show the reader as much as a spectator 
could have seen — illuminated indeed by a know- 
ledge of the past and a judgement drawn from 
known succeeding events. The historian answers 
the question, " What was ? " this or that. To the 
question " Why was it ? " if it be in the spiritual 
order (as are all major things) the reader must 
attempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes 
than those of historic science. 

It is the neglect of this canon which makes 
barren so much work. Eead Gibbon's attempt to 
account for " why " the Catholic Church arose in 
the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure. 1 

Mark also how all examination of the causes of 
the French Revolution are coloured by something 
small and degraded, quite out of proportion to that 
stupendous crusade which transformed the modern 
world. The truth is, that the historian can only 
detail those causes, largely material, all evident 
and positive, which lie within his province, and 
such causes are quite insufficient to explain the full 
result. Were I here writing " Why " the Reforma- 
tion came, my reply would not be historic but 

1 It is true that Gibbon was ill-equipped for his task because he lacked 
historical imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a past age. 
He could not enter into any mood save that of his master Voltaire. But 
it is not only true of Gibbon that he fails to explain the great revolution 
of a.d. 29-304 ; no one attempting that explanation has succeeded. It 
was not of this world. 



270 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

mystic. I should say that it came " from outside 
mankind." But that would be to affirm without 
the hope of proof and only in the confidence that 
all attempts at positive proof were contemptible. 
Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an issue, 
but only in the presentation of the thing as it was. 
Upon this I now set out. 

With the close of the Middle Ages two 
phenomena appeared side by side in the society of 
Europe. The first was an ageing and a growing 
fatigue of the simple mediaeval scheme ; the second 
was a very rapid accretion of technical power. 

As to the first, I have suggested (it is no more 
than a suggestion) that the mediaeval scheme of 
society, though much the best fitted to our race and 
much the best expression which it has yet found, 
though especially productive of happiness (which 
here and hereafter is the end of man), was not 
properly provided with instruments of survival. 

Its science was too imperfect, its institutions 
too local, though its philosophy was the widest 
ever framed and the most satisfying to the human 
intelligence. 

Whatever be the reason, that society did rapidly 
grow old. Its every institution grew formal or 
debased. The Guilds, from true co-operative 
partnerships for the proper distribution of the 
means of production and for the prevention of a 
proletariat with its vile cancer of capitalism, tended 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 271 

to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of 
Christian Europe, the village, showed faint signs 
that it might become an oligarchy of privileged 
farmers holding land and keeping men down. 
The monastic orders were tainted in patches, up 
and down Europe, with worldliness, with an abandon- 
ment of their strict rule, and occasionally with vice. 
Civil government grew befogged with tradition 
and with complex rules. All manner of theatrical 
and false trappings began to deform society, notably 
the exaggeration of heraldry and a riot of symbol- 
ism of which very soon no one could make head or 
tail. 

The temporal and visible organisation of the 
Church did not escape in such a welter. The 
lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that 
organisation suffered has been both grossly ex- 
aggerated and set out of perspective. A wild 
picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But 
in a degree the temporal organisation of the Church 
had decayed at the close of the Middle Ages. It 
was partly too much a taking of things for granted, 
a conviction that nothing could really upset the 
unity of Europe ; partly the huge concentration of 
wealth in clerical hands, which proceeded from the 
new economic activity all over Europe, coupled 
with the absolute power of the clergy in certain 
centres and the universal economic function of 
Rome ; partly a popular loss of faith. All these 



272 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

between them helped to do the business. At any 
rate the evil was there. 

All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return 
to their origins, or they fail. There appeared 
throughout Europe in the last century of united 
Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic 
attempts to revivify the common life, especially 
upon its spiritual side, by a return to the primitive 
communal enthusiasms in which religion necessarily 
has its historical origins. 

This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it 
remarkable that each such sporadic and spontaneous 
outburst should have its own taint or vice or false 
colour. 

What was remarkable, and what made the period 
unique in the whole history of Christendom (save 
for the Arian flood), was the incapacity of the 
external organisation of the Church at the moment 
to capture the spiritual discontent, and to satisfy 
the spiritual hunger of which these errors were the 
manifestation. 

In a slower time the external organisation of 
the Church would have absorbed and regulated the 
new things, good and evil. It would have rendered 
the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have 
canalised the exaltations, it would have humanised 
the discoveries. But things were moving at a rate 
more and more rapid, the whole society of Western 
Christendom raced from experience to experience. 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 273 

It was flooded with the newly-found manuscripts 
of antiquity, with the new discoveries of unknown 
continents, with new commerce, printing, and, an 
effect perhaps rather than a cause, the complete 
rebirth of painting, architecture, sculpture, and all 
the artistic expression of Europe. 

In point of fact this doubt and seething and 
attempted return to early religious enthusiasm 
were not digested and were not captured. The 
spiritual hunger of the time was not fed. Its 
extravagance was not exposed to the solvent of 
laughter or to the flame of a sufficient indignation : 
they were therefore neither withered nor eradicated. 
For the spirit had grown old. The great move- 
ment of the spirit in Europe was repressed hap- 
hazard, and quite as much haphazard encouraged ; 
but there seemed no one corporate force present 
throughout Christendom which could persuade, 
encourage, and command : even the Papacy, the 
core of our unity, was shaken by long division and 
intrigue, 

Let it be clearly understood that in the 
particular form of special heresies the business 
was local, peculiar and contemptible. Wycliffe, 
for instance, was no more the morning star of the 
Reformation than Catherine of Braganza's Tangier 
Dowry, let us say, was the morning star of the 
modern English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of 
a great number of men who were theorising up and 

T 



274 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

down Europe upon the nature of society and 
morals, each with his special metaphysic of the 
Sacrament ; each with his "system." Such sophists 
have always abounded ; they abound to - day. 
Some of Wycliffe's extravagances resemble what 
many Protestants happen, later, to have held ; 
others (such as his theory that you could not own 
land unless you were in a state of grace !) were of 
the opposite extreme to Protestantism. And so it 
is with the whole lot : and there were hundreds of 
them. There was no common theory, no common 
feeling in the various reactions against a corrupted 
ecclesiastical authority which marked the end of 
the Middle Ages. There was nothing the least 
like what we call Protestantism to-day. Indeed 
that spirit and mental colour does not appear until 
a couple of generations after the opening of the 
Reformation itself. 

What there was, was a widespread discontent 
and exasperated friction against the existing, rigid, 
and yet deeply decayed temporal organisation of 
religious affairs ; and in their uneasy fretting 
against that unworthy rule the various centres of 
irritation put up now one startling theory which 
they knew would annoy the official Church, now 
another perhaps the exact opposite of the last. 
Now they denied something as old as Europe — 
such as the right to property : now a new piece of 
usage or discipline such as communion in one kind : 



WHAT WAS THE KEFOKMATION? 275 

now an ancient enforced rule, such as celibacy. 
Some went stark mad. Others, at the contrary 
extreme, did no more than expose false relics. 

A general social ill-ease was the parent of all 
these sporadic heresies. Many had elaborate 
systems, but none of these systems was a true 
creed, that is, a motive : no one of the outbursts 
had any philosophic driving power behind it ; all 
and each were no more than violent and blind 
reactions against a clerical authority which gave 
scandal and set up an intolerable strain. 

Shall I give an example? One of the most 
popular forms which the protest took, was what I 
have just mentioned, a demand for Communion in 
both kinds, and for the restoration of what was in 
many places ancient custom, the drinking from the 
cup after the Priest. 

Could anything better prove the truth that 
mere irritation against the external organisation of 
the Church was the power at work? Could any 
point have less to do with the fundamentals of the 
Faith? Of course as an implication of false 
doctrine — as, that the Priesthood is not an Order, or 
that the Presence of Our Lord is not in both species 
— it had its importance. But in itself how trivial 
a " kick " ! Why should any one desire the cup 
save to mark dissension from established custom ? 

Here is another example. Prominent among 
the later expressions of discontent you have the 



276 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Adamites, 1 who among other tenets rejected clothes 
upon the more solemn occasions of their ritual, and 
went naked : raving maniacs. The whole business 
was a rough-and-tumble of protest against the 
breakdown of a social system whose breakdown 
seemed the more terrible because it had been such a 
haven ! Because it was in essence founded upon the 
most intimate appetites of European men. The 
heretics were angry because they had lost their home. 

This very general picture omits Huss and the 
national movement for which he stood. It omits 
the Papal Schism ; the Council of Constance ; all 
the great facts of the fifteenth century on its 
religious side. I am concerned only with the pre- 
sentation of the general character of the time, and 
that character was what I have described: an irre- 
pressible, largely justified discontent breaking out : 
a sort of chronic rash upon the skin of Christian 
Europe, which rash the body of Christendom could 
neither absorb nor cure. 

Now at this point — and before we leave the 
fifteenth century — there is another historical 
feature which it is of the utmost importance to 

1 The rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe, and 
is, like his caroer, about 100 years previous to the Reformation proper : 
tho sects are of various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have while 
dwindling rapidly in numbers kept their full doctrines for now 400 years ; 
others like the Joanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime : others like 
the Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons near a century, 
their close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado, in 1891, whose 
friends thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Wycliffites certain 
members of the Adamites until lately survived in Austria. 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 277 

seize if we are to understand what followed ; for it 
was a feature common to all European thought 
until a time long after the final establishment of 
permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature 
which nearly all historians neglect and yet one 
manifest upon the reading of any contemporary 
expression. That feature is this : No one in the 
Reformation dreamt a divided Christendom to he 
possible. 

This flood of heretical movement was oecumeni- 
cal ; it was not peculiar to one race or climate or 
culture or nation. The numberless uneasy in- 
novators thought, even the wildest of them, in 
terms of Europe as a whole. They desired to 
affect the universal Church and change it en bloc. 
They had no local ambition. They stood for no 
particular blood or temperament ; they sprang up 
everywhere, bred by the universal ill-ease of a 
society still universal. You were as likely to get 
an enthusiast declaring himself to be the Messiah 
in Seville, as an enthusiast denying the Eeal 
Presence in Aberdeen. 

That fatal habit of reading into the past what 
we know of its future, has in this matter most 
deplorably marred history, and men whether 
Protestant or Catholic, who are now accustomed 
to Protestantism, read Protestantism and the 
absurd idea of a local religion — a religion true in 
one place and untrue in another — into a time 



278 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

where the least instructed clown would have 
laughed in your face at such nonsense. 

The whole thing, the revolt, coupled with a first 
ineffectual resistance to the revolt, was something 
common to all Europe. 

It is the nature of any organic movement to 
progress or to recede. But this movement was 
destined to advance with devastating rapidity, and 
that on account of what I have called the second 
factor in the Reformation : the very rapid accretion 
in technical power which marked the close of the 
Middle Ages. 

Printing, navigation, all mensuration, the hand- 
ling of metals, and every material — all these took 
a sudden leap forward with the Renaissance, the 
revival of arts : that vast stirring of the later 
Middle Ages which promised to give us a restored 
antiquity Christianised : which was burnt in the 
flame of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing 
but ashes and incommunicable salvage. 

Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical 
experience and technical skill, were moving in the 
century before the Reformation at such a rate, that 
a contemporary spiritual phenomenon, if it advanced 
at all, was bound to advance very rapidly ; and this 
spiritual eruption in Europe came to a head just 
at the moment when the contemporary expansion 
of travel, of economic activity and of the revival 
of learning, had also emerged in their full force. 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 279 

It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth 
century that the coalescence of the various forces 
of spiritual discontent and revolt began to be 
apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to 
burst, and the Reformation proper to be started 
on its way. 

But as a preliminary to that matter, the reader 
should first understand how another and quite 
disconnected social development had prepared the 
way for the triumph of the reformers. This develop- 
ment was the advent of Absolute Government in 
civil affairs. 

Here and there in the long history of Europe 
there crops up an isolated accident, very striking, 
very effective, of short duration. We have already 
seen that the Norman race was one of these. 
Tyranny in civil government (which accompanied 
the Reformation) was another. 

A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the 
commonest and most enduring of historical things. 
Countless centuries of the old Empires of the East 
were passed under such a claim, the Roman Empire 
was based upon it ; the old Russian state was made 
by it, French society luxuriated in it for one 
magnificent century, from the accession of Louis 
XIV. till Fontenoy. It is the easiest and (when it 
works) the most prompt of all instruments. 

But the sense of an absolute civil government 
at the moment of the Reformation was something 



280 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

very different. It was a demand, an appetite, 
proceeding from the whole community, a worship 
of civil authority. It was deification of the State 
and of law ; it was the adoration of the Executive. 

" This governs me ; therefore I will worship it 
and do all it tells me." Such is the formula for 
the strange passion which has now and then seized 
great bodies of human beings intoxicated by 
splendour, and by the vivifying effects of command. 
Like all manias (for it is a mania) this exaggerated 
passion is hardly comprehended once it is past. 
Like all manias, while it is present it overrides 
every other emotion. 

Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered 
such a mania. The free cities manifested that 
disease quite as much as the great monarchical 
states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the 
papal sovereign was then magnificent beyond all 
past parallel. In Geneva, Calvin was a god. In 
Spain, Charles and Philip governed two worlds 
without question. In England, the Tudor dynasty 
was worshipped blindly. Men might and did rebel 
against a particular government, but it was only 
to set up something equally absolute in its place. 
Not the form but the fact of government was 
adored. 

I will not waste the reader's time in any 
discussion upon the causes of that astonishing 
political fever. It must suffice to say that for 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 281 

a moment it hypnotised the whole world. It 
would have been incomprehensible to the Middle 
Ages. It was incomprehensible to the nineteenth 
century. It wholly occupied the sixteenth. If 
we understand it, we largely understand what 
made the success of the Reformation possible. 

Well, then, the increasing discontent of the 
masses against the decaying forms of the Middle 
Ages, and the increasing irritation against the 
temporal government and the organisation of the 
Church, came to a head just at that moment when 
civil government was worshipped as an awful and 
almost divine thing. 

Into such an atmosphere was launched the last 
and the strongest of the many protests against 
the old social scheme, and in particular against the 
existing power of the Papacy, especially upon its 
economic side. 

The name most prominently associated with 
the crisis is that of Martin Luther, an Augustinian 
monk, German by birth and speech, and one of 
those exuberant, sensual, rather inconsequential 
characters which so easily attract hearty friend- 
ships, and which can never pretend to organisation 
or command, though certainly to creative power. 
What he precisely meant or would do, no man 
could tell, least of all himself. He was " out " 
for protest, and he floated on the crest of the 
general wave of change. That he ever intended, 



282 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

nay, that he could ever have imagined, a dis- 
ruption of the European unity is impossible. 

Luther (a voice, no leader) was but one of 
many : had he never lived, the great bursting 
wave would have crashed onward much the same. 
One scholar after another (and these of every 
blood, and from every part of Europe) joined in 
the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic 
training to the newly revived classics, of the 
ascetic to the new pride of life, of the logician 
to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl swept 
men of every type into the disruption. One thing 
only united them. They were all inflamed with 
a vital necessity for change. Great names which, 
in the ultimate challenge, refused to destroy and 
helped to preserve — the greatest is that of Erasmus ; 
great names which even appear in the roll of 
the Catholic martyrs — the blessed Thomas More 
is the greatest of these — must here be counted 
with the names of men like the narrow Calvin 
on the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the 
other. Not one ardent mind in the first half of 
the sixteenth century but was swept into the 
stream. 

' Now, all this would, and must, have been quieted 
in the process of time, the mass of Christendom 
would have settled back into unity, the populace 
would have felt instinctively the risk they ran 
of spoliation by the rich and powerful, if the 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 283 

popular institutions of Christendom broke down : 
the masses would have all swung round to solidify- 
ing society after an upheaval (it is their function) : 
we should have attained repose, and Europe, united 
again, would have gone forward as she did after 
the rocking of four hundred years before — but for 
that other factor of which I have spoken, the 
passion which this eager creative moment felt for 
the absolute in civil government — that craving 
for the something godlike which makes men 
worship a flag, a throne, or a national hymn. 

This it was which caught up and, in the persons 
of particular men, used the highest of the tide. 
Certain princes in the Germanies (who had, of all 
the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning 
of authority) befriended here one heresiarch and 
there another. The very fact that the Pope at 
Rome stood for one of these absolute governments 
put other absolute governments against him. The 
wind of the business rose ; it became a quarrel 
of sovereigns. And the sovereigns decided, and 
powerful usurping nobles or leaders decided, the 
future of the herd. 

Two further characters appeared side by side 
in the earthquake that was breaking up Europe. 

The first was this : the tendency to fall away 
from European unity seemed more and more 
marked in those outer places which lay beyond 
the original limits of the old Roman Empire, and 



284 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

notably in the Northern Netherlands and in 
Northern Germany — where men easily submitted 
to the control of wealthy merchants and of 
hereditary landlords. 

The second was this : a profound distrust of 
the new movement, a reaction against it, a feeling 
that moral anarchy was too profitable to the rich 
and the cupidinous, began at first in a dull, later 
in an angry, way to stir the masses of the populace 
throughout all Christendom. 

The stronger the old Latin sense of human 
equality was, the more the populace felt this, the 
more they instinctively conceived of the Reforma- 
tion as something that would rob them of some 
ill-understood but profound spiritual guarantee 
against slavery, exploitation, and oppression. 

There began a sort of popular grumbling against 
the Reformers, who were now already schismatic ; 
their rich patrons fell under the same suspicion. 
By the time the movement had reached a head, 
and by the time the central power of the Church 
had been openly defied by the German princes, 
this protest took, as in France and England and 
the valley of the Rhine (the ancient seats of 
culture), a noise like the undertone of the sea 
before bad weather. In the outer Germanies it 
was not a defence of Christendom at all, but a 
brutish cry for more food. But everywhere the 
populace stirred. 



WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 285 

A general observer, ignorant of what was to 
come, would have been certain at this moment 
that the populace would rise. When it rose 
intelligently the movement against the Church 
and civilisation would come to nothing. The 
revolt elsewhere — in half-barbaric Europe — would 
come to no more than the lopping off of outer 
and insignificant things. The Baltic Plain, sundry 
units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, 
probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain 
mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy, and 
France and the Pyrenees, which had suffered from 
lack of instruction and could easily be recovered — 
these would be affected. The outer parts, which 
had never been within the pale of the Roman 
Empire, might go. But the soul and intelligence 
of Europe would be kept sound ; its general body 
would reunite and Christendom would once more 
reappear whole and triumphant. It would have 
reconquered these outer parts at its leisure : and 
Poland was a sure bastion. We should, within a 
century, have been ourselves once more : Christian 
men. 

So it would have been — but for one master 
tragedy which changed the whole scheme. Of the 
four great remaining units of Western civilisation, 
Iberia, Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical 
moment, broke down by a tragic accident) and lost 
continuity. It was hardly intended. It was a 



286 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

consequence of error much more than an act of 
will. But it had full effect. 

The breakdown of Britain and her failure to 
resist disruption was the chief event of all. It 
made the Reformation permanent. It confirmed a 
final division in Europe. 

By a curious accident, one province, extraneous 
to the Empire, Ireland, heroically preserved what 
the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies and 
Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of 
Britain, and cut off by that loss from direct succour, 
Ireland preserved the tradition of civilisation. 

It must be my next business to describe the way 
in which Britain failed in the struggle, and, at the 
hands of the King, and of a little group of 
avaricious men (such as the Howards among the 
gentry, and the Cecils among the adventurers) 
changed for the worse the history of Europe. 



IX 

THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 



287 



IX 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 

One thing stands out in the fate of modern 
Europe : the profound cleavage due to the Re- 
formation. One thing made that wound (it was 
almost mortal) so deep and lasting : the failure of 
one ancient province of civilisation, and one only, 
to keep the Faith : this province wherein I write : 
Britain. 

The capital event, the critical moment, in the 
great struggle of the Faith against the Reformation, 
was the defection of Britain. 

It is a point which the modern historian, who 
is still normally anti-Catholic, does not and cannot 
make. Yet the defection of Britain from the Faith 
of Europe three hundred years ago is certainly the 
most important historical event in the last thousand 
years : between the saving of Europe from the 
barbarians and these our own times. It is perhaps 
the most important historical event since the 
triumph of the Catholic Church under Constantine. 

Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem 
289 u 



290 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

as they would be seen by an impartial observer 
from some great distance in time, or in space, or in 
mental attitude. Let me put them as they would 
appear to one quite indifferent to, and remote from, 
the antagonists. 

To such an observer the history of Europe 
would be that of the great Roman Empire passing 
through the transformation I have described : its 
mind first more and more restless, then more and 
more tending to a certain conclusion, aud that 
conclusion the Catholic Church. 

To summarise what has gone before : the 
Catholic Church becomes by the fifth century the 
soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. 
It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely 
geographical, of the Eastern schism. It is of its 
nature perpetually subject to assault ; from within 
because it deals with matters not open to positive 
proof; from without, because all those, whether 
aliens or guests or parasites, who are not of our 
civilisation are naturally its enemies. 

The Roman Empire of the West, in which the 
purity and the unity of this soul were preserved 
from generation to generation, declined in its body 
during the Dark Ages — say up to and rather 
beyond the year 1000. It became coarsened and 
less in its material powers. It lost its central 
organisation, the Imperial Court (which was 
replaced first by provincial military leaders or 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 291 

" kings," then, later, by a mass of local lordships 
jumbled into more or less national groups). In 
building, in writing, in cooking, in clothing, in 
drawing, in sculpture, the Roman Empire of the 
West (which is ourselves) forgot all but the 
fundamentals of its arts — but it expanded so far 
as its area is concerned. A whole belt of barbaric 
Germany received the Roman influence — Baptism 
and the Mass. With the Creed there came to 
these outer parts reading and writing, building in 
brick and stone — all the material essentials of our 
civilisation — and what is characteristic of that 
culture, the power of thinking more clearly. 

It is centuries before this slow digestion of the 
barbarian reaches longitude 10° East, and the 
Scandinavian Peninsula. But a thousand years 
after Our Lord it has reached even these, and 
there remains between the unbroken tradition of 
our civilisation in the West and the schismatic 
but Christian civilisation of the Greek Church 
nothing but a belt of paganism from the corner of 
the Baltic southward, which belt is lessened year 
after year by the armed efforts and the rational 
dominance of Latin culture. Our Christian and 
Roman culture proceeds continuously eastward, 
mastering the uncouth. 

After this general picture of a civilisation 
dominating and mastering in its material decline a 
vastly greater area than it had known in the 



292 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

height of its material excellence — this sort of expan- 
sion in the dark — the observer, whom we have 
supposed, would remark a sort of dawn. 

That dawn came with the eleventh century : 
1000-1100. The Norman race, the sudden invig- 
oration of the Papacy, the new victories in Spain, 
at last the first Crusade, mark a turn in the tide of 
material decline, and that tide works very rapidly 
towards a new and intense civilisation which we 
call that of the Middle Ages : that high renewal 
which gives Europe a second and most marvellous 
life, which is a late reflowering of Rome, but of 
Rome revivified with the virtue and the humour of 
the Faith. 

The second thing the observer would note in so 
general a picture would be the peculiar exception 
formed within it by the group of large islands 
lying to the North and West of the Continent. 
Of these the larger, Britain, had been a true 
Roman province ; but very early in the process — 
in the middle and end of the fifth century — it had 
on the first assault of the barbarians been cut off 
for more than the lifetime of a man. Its gate had 
been held by the barbauan. Then it was re- 
Christianised almost as thoroughly as though even 
its Eastern part had never lost the authority of 
civilisation. The Mission of St. Augustine re- 
captured Britain — but Britain is remarkable in the 
history of civilisation for the fact that alone of 



THE DEFECTION OF BEITAIN 293 

civilised lands it needed to be recaptured at all. 
The western island of the two, the smaller island, 
Ireland, presented another exception. 

It was not compelled to the Christian culture, 
as were the German barbarians of the Continent, 
by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic armies 
forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not 
savage like the Germanies ; it was therefore under 
no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass 
of shifting tribes ; it was a nation. But in a most 
exceptional fashion, though already possessed, and 
perhaps because so possessed of, a high pagan 
culture of its own, it accepted within the lifetime 
of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the 
whole spirit of the Creed. The civilisation of the 
Boman West was accepted by Ireland, not as a 
command nor as an influence, but as a discovery. 

Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to 
the North and West of the Continent remain in 
the observer's mind, and he will note, when the 
shock of what is called " the Beformation " comes, 
new phenomena attaching to those islands, cognate 
to their early history. 

Those phenomena are the thesis which I have 
to present in the pages that follow. 

What we call " the Beformation " was essentially 
the reaction of the barbaric, the ill-tutored and the 
isolated places external to the old and deep-rooted 
Boman civilisation, against the influences of that 



294 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

civilisation. The Reformation was not racial. 
Even if there were such a physical thing as a 
" Teutonic Race " (and there is nothing of the 
kind) the Reformation shows no coincidence with 
that race. The Reformation is simply the turning- 
back of that tide of Roman culture, which, for seven 
hundred years, had set steadily forward and had 
progressively dominated the insufficient by the 
sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the confused 
by the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by 
the conquered against a moral and intellectual 
superiority which offended them. The Slavs of 
Bohemia joined in that sincere protest of the lately 
and insufficiently civilised, quite as strongly as, 
and even earlier than, the vague peoples of the 
sandy heaths along the Baltic. The Scandinavian, 
physically quite different from these tribes of the 
Baltic Plain, comes into the game. Wretched 
villages in the mark of Brandenburg, as Slavonic in 
type as the villages of Bohemia, revolt as naturally 
against exalted and difficult mystery as do the 
isolated villages of the Swedish valleys or the 
isolated rustics of the Cevennes or the Alps. The 
revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore en- 
joying the sincere motive which accompanies such 
risings, but deprived of unity and of organising 
power. There has never been a fixed Protestant 
creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction 
against the traditions of Europe. 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 295 

Now the point to seize is this : 

Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to 
speak upon the mere historical plane) to civilisation, 
bad as it was that the tide of culture should have 
begun to ebb from the far regions which it had 
once so beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that 
is the reaction against the unity, the discipline, 
and the clear thought of Europe, would never have 
counted largely in human affairs had it been 
confined to the external fringe of the civilised 
world. That fringe would probably have been 
reconquered. The inherent force attaching to 
reality and to the stronger mind should have led 
to its recovery. The northern Germanies were, 
as a fact, beaten when Richelieu stepped in and 
saved them from their southern superiors. But 
perhaps they would not have been reconquered. 
Perhaps they would have lapsed quite soon into their 
original paganism. At any rate European culture 
would have continued undivided and strong with- 
out these outer regions. Unfortunately a far worse 
thing happened. 

Europe was rent and has remained divided. 

The disaster was accomplished through forces I 
will now describe. 

Though the revolt was external to the founda- 
tions of Europe, to the ancient provinces of the 
Empire, yet an internal consequence of that revolt 
arose within the ancient provinces. It may be 



296 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

briefly told. The wealthy took advantage within 
the heart of civilisation itself of this external 
revolt against order; for it is always to the 
advantage of the wealthy to deny general con- 
ceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular 
philosophy, and to weaken the drastic and immedi- 
ate power of the human will, organised throughout 
the whole community. It is always in the nature 
of great wealth to be insanely tempted (though it 
should know from active experience how little 
wealth can give) to push on to more and more 
domination over the bodies of men — and it can do 
so best by attacking fixed social restraints. 

The landed squires then, and the great mer- 
chants powerfully supported by the Jewish financial 
communities in the principal towns, felt that — 
with the Reformation — their opportunity had come. 
The largest fortune holders, the nobles, the mer- 
chants of the ports and local capitals even in Gaul 
(that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human 
life) licked their lips. Everywhere in northern 
Italy, in southern Germany, upon the Rhine, 
wherever wealth had congested in a few hands, the 
chance of breaking with the old morals was a 
powerful appeal to the wealthy ; and, therefore, 
throughout Europe, even in its most ancient seats 
of civilisation, the outer barbarian had allies. 

These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe 
from within, had no excuse. Theirs was not any 



THE DEFECTION OF BEITAIN 297 

dumb instinctive revolt like that of the Outer 
Germanies, the Outer Slavs, or the neglected 
mountain valleys, against order and against clear 
thought, with all the hard consequences that clear 
thought brings. They were in no way subject to 
enthusiasm for the vaguer emotions roused by the 
Gospel, or for the more turgid excitements derivable 
from Scripture, and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. 
They were "on the make." The rich in Montpellier 
and Nimes, a knot of them in Rome itself, many 
in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual 
aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the 
Renaissance, supported the strong inflamed critics 
of clerical misliving, and even winked solemnly at 
the lunatic inspirations of obscure men and women 
filled with " visions." They did all these things 
as though their object was religious change. But 
their true object was money. 

One group, and one alone, of the European 
nations was too recently filled with combat against 
vile non-Christian things to accept any parley 
with this an ti- Christian turmoil. That unit was 
the Iberian Peninsula. It is worthy of remark — 
especially on the part of those who realise that the 
sword fits the hand of the Church and that 
Catholicism is never more alive than when it is in 
arms — I say it is worthy of remark by these that 
Spain and Portugal, through the very greatness of 
an experience still recent when the Reformation 



298 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

broke, lost the chance of combat. There came 
indeed, from Spain (but from the Basque nation 
there), that weapon of steel, the Society of Jesus, 
which St. Ignatius formed, and which, surgical and 
military, saved the Faith, and therefore Europe. 
But the Iberian Peninsula rejecting as one whole 
with contempt and with abhorrence (and rejecting 
rightly) any consideration of revolt — even among 
its rich men — thereby lost its opportunity for 
combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which 
revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain 
would be the stronger to-day had it fallen to her 
task, as it did to the general populace of Gaul, to 
come to hand-grips with the Reformation at home, 
to test it, to know it, to dominate it, to bend the 
muscles upon it, and to re-emerge triumphant from 
the struggle. 

I say, then, that there was present in the field 
against the Church a powerful ally for the Re- 
formers : and that ally was the body of immoral 
rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the 
popular organisation of society. The atheism and 
the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality, the 
scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance, 
answered, over the heads of the Catholic populace, 
the call of barbarism. The iconoclasts of greed 
joined hands with the iconoclasts of blindness and 
rage and with the iconoclasts of academic pride. 

Nevertheless, even with such allies barbarism 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 299 

would shave failed, the Reformation would to-day 
be but an historical episode without fruit, Europe 
would still be Christendom, had not there been 
added the decisive factor of all — which was the 
separation of Britain. 

Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss 
of Britain of such capital importance ? 

The loss of Britain was of such capital importance 
because Britain alone of those who departed was 
Roman, and therefore capable of endurance and 
increase. And why did Britain fail in that great 
ordeal ? It is a question harder to answer. 

The province of Britain was not a very great 
one in area or in numbers when the Reformation 
broke out. It was, indeed, very wealthy for its 
size, as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth 
does not account for the fundamental importance 
of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the sixteenth 
century. The real point was that one and only one 
of the old Roman provinces — with their tradition 
of civilisation, letters, persuasive power, multiple 
soul — one and only one went over to the barbaric 
enemy and gave that enemy its aid. That one was 
Britain. And the consequence of its defection was 
the perpetration and extension of an increasingly 
evil division within the structure of the West. 

To say that Britain lost hold of tradition in the 
sixteenth century because Britain is " Teutonic " is 
to talk nonsense. It is to explain a real problem 



300 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

by inventing unreal words. Britain is not 
"Teutonic," nor does the word "Teutonic" itself 
mean anything definite. To say that Britain 
revolted because the seeds of revolt were stronger 
in her than in any ancient province of Europe is 
to know nothing of history. The seeds of revolt 
were in her then as they were in every com- 
munity ; as they must be in every individual who 
may find any form of discipline a burden which 
he is tempted in a moment of disorder to lay down. 
But to pretend that England and the Lowlands of 
Scotland, to pretend that the province of Britain 
in our general civilisation was more ready for the 
change than the infected portions of southern 
Gaul, or the humming towns of northern Italy, 
or the intense life of Hainault, or Brabant, is to 
show great ignorance of the European past. 

Well, then, how did Britain break away ? 

I beg the reader to pay special attention to the 
next page or so. I believe it to be of capital value 
in explaining the general history of Europe, and I 
know it to be hardly ever told ; or — if told at all — 
told only in fragments. 

England went because of three things. First, 
her squires had already become too powerful. In 
other words, the economic power of a small class of 
wealthy men had grown, on account of peculiar 
insular conditions, greater than was healthy for the 
community. 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 301 

Secondly, England was, more than any other 
part of Western Europe (save the Batavian 
March), 1 a series of markets and of ports, a place 
of very active cosmopolitan influence, in which 
new opportunities for the corrupt, new messages 
of the enthusiastic, were frequent. 

In the third place, that curious phenomenon on 
which I dwelt in the last chapter, the superstitious 
attachment of citizens to the civil power, to awe 
of, and devotion to, the monarch, was exaggerated 
in England as nowhere else. 

Now put these three things together, especially 
the first and third (for the second was both of 
minor importance and more superficial), and you 
will appreciate why England fell. 

One small, too wealthy class, tainted with the 
atheism that always creeps into wealth long and 
securely enjoyed, was beginning to possess too 
much of English land. It would take far too long 
to describe here what the process had been. It is 
true that the absolute monopoly of the soil, the 
gripping and the strangling of the populace by 
landlords, is a purely Protestant development. 
Nothing of that kind had happened or would have 
been conceived of as possible in pre-Reformation 
England ; but still something like a quarter of the 
land (or a little less) had already before the 

1 I mean Belgium : that frontier of Roman influence upon the lower 
Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith and just preserved it. 



302 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

Reformation got into the full possession of one 
small class which had also begun to encroach 
upon the judiciary, in some measure to supplant 
the populace in local law-making, and quite 
appreciably to supplant the king in central law- 
making. 

Let me not be misunderstood ; the England 
of the fifteenth century, the England of the 
generation just before the Reformation, was not an 
England of squires ; it was not an England of 
landlords ; it was still an England of Englishmen. 
The towns were quite free. To this day old 
boroughs nearly always show a great number of 
freeholds. The process by which the later English 
aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up was 
but in germ before the Reformation. Nor had 
that germ sprouted. But for the Reformation it 
would not have matured. Sooner or later a 
popular revolt (had the Faith revived) would have 
killed the growing usurpation of the wealthy. 
But the germ was there ; and the Reformation 
coming just as it did, was both helped by the rich 
and helped them. 

The slow acquisition of considerable power over 
the Courts of Law and over the soil of the country 
by an oligarchy, imperfect though that acquisition 
was as yet, already presented just after 1500 a 
predisposing condition to the disease. It may be 
urged that if the English people had fought the 



THE DEFECTION OF BKITAIN 303 

growing power of the squires more vigorously the 
squires would not have mastered them as they did 
during and on account of the religious revolution. 
Possibly ; and the enemies of the English people 
are quick to suggest that some native sluggishness 
permitted the gradual weighing down of the social 
balance in favour of the rich. But no one who can 
even pretend to know mediaeval England will say 
that the English consciously desired or willingly per- 
mitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful 
foreign wars, dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous 
awakening of national consciousness, which con- 
sciousness had centred in the wealthier classes — all 
these combined to let the evil in without warning, 
and, on the eve of the Keformation, a rich, avaricious 
class was already empowered to act in Britain, 
ready to grasp, as all the avaricious classes were 
throughout the Western world, at the opportunity 
to revolt against that Faith which has ever 
suspected, constrained and reformed the tyranny 
of wealth. 

Now add to this the strange, but at that time 
very real, worship of government as a fetish. 
This spirit did not really strengthen government : 
far from it. A superstition never strengthens its 
object, nor even makes of the supposed power of 
that object a reality. But though it did not give 
real power to the long intention of the prince, 
it gave to the momentary word of the prince 



304 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 

a fantastic power. In such a combination of 
circumstances — nascent oligarchy, but the prince 
worshipped — you get, holding the position of prince, 
Henry VIII., a thorough Tudor, that is, a man 
weak almost to the point of irresponsibility where 
his passions were concerned; violent from that 
organic weakness which, in the absence of opposi- 
tion, ruins things as effectively as any strength. 

No executive power in Europe was less in 
sympathy with the revolt against civilisation than 
was the Tudor family. Upon the contrary, Henry 
VII. , his son, and his two granddaughters, if 
anything, exceeded in their passion for the old 
order of the Western world. But at the least 
sign of resistance, Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who 
intrigued, Henry their father who pillaged, Henry 
their grandfather who robbed and hoarded, were 
one. To these characters slight resistance was a 
spur ; with strong manifold opposition they were 
quite powerless to deal. Their minds did not grip 
(for their minds, though acute, were not large), but 
their passions shot. And one may compare them, 
when their passions of pride, of lust, of jealousy, of 
doting, of avarice, or of facile power were aroused, 
to vehement children. Never was there a ruling 
family less statesmanlike ; never one less full of 
tenacious purpose, stuff, and creative power. 

Henry, urged by an imperious young woman 
who had gained control of him, desired a divorce 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 305 

from his wife Katherine of Aragon, grown old for 
him. The Papal Court temporised with him and 
opposed him. He was incapable of negotiation 
and still more incapable of foresight. His energy, 
which was "of an Arabian sort," blasted through 
the void because a void was there : none would 
then withstand the Prince. Of course it seemed 
to him no more than one of those recurrent 
quarrels with the mundane power of Pome which 
all kings (and saints among them) had engaged 
in for many hundred years. All real powers thus 
conflict in all times. But, had he known it (and 
he did not know it), the moment was fatally 
inopportune for playing that game. Henry never 
meant to break permanently with the unity of 
Christendom. A disruption of that unity was 
probably inconceivable to him. He meant to 
"exercise pressure." All his acts from the decisive 
Proclamation of September 19, 1530 onwards 
prove it. But the moment was the moment of a 
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, 
blundered into disaster without knowing what the 
fulness of that moment was. He was devout, 
especially to the Blessed Sacrament. He kept the 
Faith for himself, and he tried hard to keep it for 
others. But having lost unity he let in what he 
loathed. Not, so long as he lived, could those 
doctrines of the Peformers triumph here : but he 
had compromised with their spirit, and at his 



306 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

death a strong minority — perhaps a tenth of 
England, more of London — was already hostile to 
the Creed. 

It was the same thing with the suppression of 
the monasteries. Henry meant no effect on religion 
by that loot : he none the less destroyed it. He 
intended to enrich the Crown : he ruined it. In 
the matter of their financial endowment an 
economic crisis, produced by the unequal growth 
of economic powers, had made the monastic 
foundation ripe for resettlement. Religious orders 
were here wealthy without reason — poor in spirit 
and numbers but rich in land ; there impoverished 
without reason — rich in popularity and spiritual 
power but poor in land. The dislocation which all 
institutions necessarily suffer on the economic side 
through the mere efflux of time, inclined every 
government in Europe to a resettlement of religious 
endowments. Everywhere it took place ; every- 
where it involved dissolution and restoration. 

But Henry did not resettle. He plundered and 
broke. He used the contemporary idolatry of 
executive power just as much at Reading or in 
the Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and 
immediate popular feeling was with him, as at 
Glastonbury where it was against him, as in 
Yorkshire where it was in arms, as in Gal way 
where there was no bearing with it at all. There 
was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 307 

complexity, and when in this Jacobin, crude way- 
he had simply got rid of that which he should 
have restored and transformed, of what effect 
was that vast act of spoliation ? It paralysed 
the Church. It ultimately brought down the 
Monarchy. 

From a fourth to a third of the economic power 
over the means of production in England, which 
had been vested unevenly in the religious founda- 
tions — here far too rich, there far too poor — 
Henry got by one enormous confiscation. Yet he 
made no permanent addition to the wealth of the 
Crown. On the contrary, he started its decline. 
The land passed by an instinctive multiple process 
— but very rapidly — to the already powerful class 
which had begun to dominate. Then, when it 
was too late, the Tudors attempted to stem the 
tide. But the thing was done. Upon the indiffer- 
ence which is always common to a society long 
and profoundly Catholic and ignorant of heresy, 
or, having conquered heresy, ignorant at any rate 
of struggle for the Faith, two ardent minorities 
combined : the small minority of confused en- 
thusiasts who really did desire what they believed 
to be a restoration of a supposed "primitive" 
Christianity ; the much larger minority of men 
now grown almost invincibly powerful in the 
economic sphere. The squires, twenty years after 
Henry's death, had come to possess, through the 



308 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

ruin of religion, something like half the land of 
England. 

With the rapidity of a fungus growth the new 
wealth spread over the desolation of the land. 
The newly enriched captured both the Universities, 
all the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. 
They won their great civil war against the Crown. 
In little more than a century after Henry's folly 
they had established themselves in the place of 
what had once been the monarchy and central 
government of England. The impoverished Crown 
resisted in vain ; they killed one embarrassed King 
— Charles I. — and they set up his son, Charles II., 
as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their 
victory over the Crown they and the capitalists 
who have sprung from their avarice and their 
philosophy, and largely from their very loins, have 
been completely masters of England. 

Here the reader may say : " What ! this large 
national movement to be interpreted as the work 
of such minorities ? A few thousand squires and 
merchants backing a few more thousand enthusiasts, 
changed utterly the mass of England ? " Yes ; to 
interpret it otherwise is to read history backwards. 
It is to think that England then was what England 
later became. There is no more fatal fault in the 
reading of history, nor any illusion to which the 
human mind is more prone. To read the remote 
past in the light of the recent past ; to think the 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 309 

process of the one towards the other " inevitable " ; 
to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable 
process, independent of the human will, still suits 
the materialist pantheism of our time. There is 
an inherent tendency in all men to this fallacy of 
reading themselves into the past, and of thinking 
their own mood a consummation at once excellent 
and necessary : and most men who write of these 
things imagine a vaguely Protestant Tudor England 
growing consciously Protestant in the England of 
the Stuarts. 

That is not history. It is history to put your- 
self by a combined effort of reading and of 
imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though 
you did not know what Wednesday was to be, and 
then to describe what Tuesday was. England did 
not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she was 
Protestant then. Rather she is Protestant now 
because she then lost the Faith. 

Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth 
century Englishman in the midst of the Reforma- 
tion, and what do you feel and see? A society 
wholly Catholic in tradition, lax and careless in 
Catholic practice ; irritated or enlivened here and 
there by a few furious preachers, or by a few 
enthusiastic scholars ; at once devoted to and in 
terror of the civil government ; intensely national ; 
in all the roots and traditions of its civilisation, 
Roman ; impatient of the disproportion of society, 



310 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

and in particular of economic disproportion in the 
religious aspect of society, because the religious 
function, by the very definition of Catholicism, 
by its very creed, should be the first to redress 
tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes first a 
mania for his King ; next a violent economic 
revolution, which in many parts can be made to 
seem an approach to justice ; finally a national 
appeal of the strongest kind against the encroaching 
power of Spain. 

When the work was done, say by 1620-30, the 
communication between England and those parts of 
the ancient West which were still furiously resisting 
the storm was cut. No spiritual force could move 
England after the Armada and its effect, save what 
might arise spontaneously in the many excited 
men who still believed (they continued to believe 
it for fifty years) that the whole Church of Christ 
had gone wrong from birth ; that its original 
could be restored, and that personal revelations 
were granted them for their guidance. 

These visionaries were the Reformers ; to these, 
souls still athirst for spiritual guidance turned. 
They were a minority even at the end of the 
sixteenth century, the last years of Elizabeth, but 
they were a minority full of initiative and of action. 
With the turn of the century (1600-1620) the last 
men who could remember Catholic training were 
very old or dead. The new generation could turn 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 311 

to nothing but the new spirit. For authority it 
could find nothing definite but a printed book : a 
translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, For teachers, 
nothing but this minority, the Reformers. That 
minority, though remaining a minority, leavened 
and at last controlled the whole nation : by the 
first third of the seventeenth century Britain was 
utterly cut off from the unity of Christendom and 
its new character was sealed. Its Catholic Faith 
was dead. 

The governing class remained largely indifferent 
(as it still is) to religion, yet it remained highly 
cultured. The populace drifted here into complete 
indifference, there into orgiastic or baser forms of 
worship. The middle class went over in a solid 
body to the enemy. The barbarism of the Outer 
G-ermanies permeated it and transformed it. The 
closer - reasoned, far more perverted and harder 
French heresy of Calvin partly deflected the 
current — and a whole new society was formed and 
launched. That was the English Reformation. 

Its effect on Europe was stupendous ; for, 
though England was cut off, England was still 
England. You could not destroy in a Roman 
province the great traditions of municipality and 
letters. It was as though a phalanx of trained 
troops had crossed the frontier in some border 
war and turned against their former comrades. 
England lent, and has from that day continuously 



312 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

lent, the strength of a great civilised tradition to 
forces whose original initiative was directed against 
European civilisation and its tradition. The loss 
of Britain was the one great wound in the body of 
the Western world. It is not yet healed. 

Yet all this while that other island of the group 
to the North-West of Europe, that island which 
had never been conquered by armed civilisation as 
were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously, 
and, as it were, miraculously accepted the Faith, 
presented a contrasting exception. Against the 
loss of Britain, which had been a Roman province, 
the Faith, when the smoke of battle cleared off, 
could discover the astonishing loyalty of Ireland. 
And over against this exceptional province — 
Britain — now lost to the Faith, lay an equally 
exceptional and unique outer part which had never 
been a Roman province, yet which now remained 
true to the tradition of Roman men ; it balanced 
the map like a counter-weight. The efforts to 
destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in 
violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution 
in any part or time of the world. They have 
failed. As I cannot explain why they have failed, 
so I shall not attempt to explain how and why the 
Faith in Ireland was saved when the Faith in 
Britain went under. I do not believe it capable 
of an historic explanation. It seems to me a 
phenomenon essentially miraculous in character, 



THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 313 

not generally attached (as are all historical 
phenomena) to the general and divine purpose that 
governs our large political events, but directly 
and specially attached. It is of great significance ; 
how great, men will be able to see, many years 
hence or to-morrow, when another definite battle 
is joined between the forces of the Church and her 
opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe 
has maintained a perfect integrity and has kept 
serene, without internal reactions and without 
their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe 
which is the Catholic Church. 

I have now nothing left to set down but the 
conclusion of this disaster : its spiritual result — 
an isolation of the soul ; its political result — a 
consequence of the spiritual — the prodigious release 
of energy, the consequent advance of special 
knowledge, the domination of the few under a 
competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the 
many, the ruin of happiness, and the final threat 
of chaos. 



X 

CONCLUSION 



315 



X 

CONCLUSION 

The grand effect of the Reformation was the 
isolation of the soul. 

This was its fruit : from this all its consequences 
proceed : not only those clearly noxious, which have 
put in jeopardy the whole of our traditions and all 
our happiness, but those apparently advantageous, 
especially in material things. 

The process cannot be seen at work if we take 
a particular date — especially too early a date — and 
call it the moment of catastrophe. There was a 
long interval of confusion and doubt, in which 
it was not certain whether the catastrophe would 
be final or no, in which its final form remained un- 
determined, and only upon the conclusion of which 
could modern Europe, with its new divisions and 
its new fates, be clearly perceived. The breach 
with authority began in the very first years of the 
sixteenth century. It is not till the middle of the 
seventeenth century at least, and even somewhat 
later, that the new era begins. 

317 



318 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

For more than a hundred years the conception 
of the struggle as an oecumenical struggle, as 
something affecting the whole body of Europe, 
continued. The general upheaval, the revolt, 
which first shook the West in the early years of 
the sixteenth century — to take a particular year, 
the year 1517 — concerned all our civilisation, was 
everywhere debated, produced a universal reaction 
met by as universal a resistance, for three genera- 
tions of men. No young man who saw the first 
outbreak of the storm could imagine it, even in 
old age, as a disruption of Europe. No such man 
lived to see it more than half-way through. 

It was not till a corresponding date in the 
succeeding century — or rather later — not till 
Elizabeth of England and Henry the Fourth 
of France were dead (and all the protagonists, 
the Reformers on the one side, Loyola, Neri, 
on the other, long dead), not till the career 
of Richelieu in France and the beginnings of an 
aristocratic Parliament in England were apparent, 
that the Reformation could clearly be seen to have 
separated certain districts of our civilisation from 
the general traditions of the whole and to have 
produced, in special regions and sections of society, 
the peculiar Protestant type which was to mark 
the future. 

The work of the Reformation was accomplished, 
one may say, a little after the outbreak of the 



CONCLUSION 319 

Thirty Years War. England in particular was 
definitely Protestant by the decade 1620-1630 — 
hardly ear]ier. The French Huguenot body, 
though still confused with political effort, had 
come to have a separate and real existence at 
about the same time. The Oligarchy of Dutch 
merchants had similarly cut off their part of the 
Low Countries from imperial rule, and virtually 
established their independence. The North German 
Principalities and sundry smaller states of the 
mountains (notably Geneva) had definitely received 
the new stamp. As definitely France, Bohemia, the 
Danube, Poland, Italy, and all the South were saved. 
Though an armed struggle was long to continue, 
though the North Germans were nearly recaptured 
by the Imperial Power and only saved by French 
policy ; though we were to have a reflex of it here 
in the Civil Wars and the destruction of the Crown, 
and though the last struggle against the Stuarts 
and greater general war against Louis XIV. were 
but sequels to the vast affair, yet the great con- 
sequence of that affair was fixed before these wars 
began. The first third of the seventeenth century 
launches a new epoch. From about that time 
there go forward upon parallel lines the great 
spiritual, and consequent temporal, processes of 
modern Europe. They have yet to come to 
judgement, for they are not yet fulfilled : but 
perhaps their judgement is near. 



320 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

These processes, filling the last 300 years, have 
been as follows : 

(1) A rapid extension of physical science and 
with it every other form of acquaintance with 
demonstrable and measurable things. 

(2) The rise, chiefly in the new Protestant part 
of Europe (but spreading thence in part to the 
Catholic) of what we call to-day " Capitalism," 
that is, the possession of the means of production 
by the few, and their exploitation of the many. 

(3) The corruption of the principle of authority 
until it was confused with mere force. 

(4) The general, though not universal, growth 
of total wealth with the growth of physical know- 
ledge. 

(5) The ever -widening effect of scepticism, 
which, whether masked under traditional forms or 
no, was from the beginning a spirit of complete 
negation, and led at last to the questioning not 
only of any human institution, but of the very 
forms of thought and of the mathematical truths. 

(6) With all these, of course, we have had a 
universal mark — the progressive extension of 
despair. 

Could any one look back upon those three 
centuries from some very great distance of time, 
he would see them as an episode of extraordinary 
extension in things that should be dissociated : 
knowledge and wealth, on the one hand, the un- 



CONCLUSION 321 

happiness of men upon the other. And he would 
see that as the process matured, or rather as the 
corruption deepened, all its marks were pushed to 
a degree so extreme as to jeopardise at last the 
very structure of European society. Physical 
science acquired such power, the oppression of the 
poor was pushed to such a length, the reasoning 
spirit in man was permitted to attain such a 
tottering pitch of insecurity, that a question never 
yet put to Europe arose at last — whether Europe, 
not from external foes, but from her own inward 
lesions may not fail ? 

Corresponding to that terrible and as yet un- 
answered question — the culmination of so much 
evil — necessarily arises this the sole vital formula 
of our time : " Europe must return to the Faith, 
or she will perish." 

I have said that the prime product of the 
Reformation was the isolation of the soul. That 
truth contains, in its development, very much 
more than its mere statement might promise. 

The isolation of the soul means a loss of 
corporate sustenance ; of the sane balance produced 
by common experience, a public certainty, and 
the general will. The isolation of the soul is the 
very definition of its unhappiness. But this 
solvent applied to society does very much more 
than merely complete and confirm human misery. 



322 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

In the first place, and underlying all, the 
isolation of the soul releases in a society a furious 
new accession of force. The break up of any 
stable system, in physics as in society, makes actual 
a prodigious reserve of potential energy. It trans- 
forms the power that was keeping things together 
into a power driving separately each component 
part : the effect of an explosion. 

That is why the Reformation launched the 
whole series of material advance, but launched it 
chaotically and on divergent lines which could 
only end in disaster. But the thing had many 
other results. 

Thus, we next notice that the new isolation of 
the soul compelled the isolated soul to strong 
vagaries. The soul will not remain in the void. 
If you blind it, it will grope. If it cannot grasp 
what it appreciates by every sense, it will grasp 
what it appreciates by only one. 

On this account in the dissolution of the 
corporate bond and of corporate religion, you had 
successive idols set up, worthy and unworthy ; none 
of them permanent. The highest and the most 
permanent was a reaction towards corporate life in 
the shape of a worship of nationality — patriotism. 

You had at one end of the scale extraordinary 
new tabus : the erection in one place of a sort of 
maniac god, blood-thirsty, an object of terror : in 
another (or the same) a curious new ritual 



CONCLUSION 323 

observance of nothingness upon every seventh day. 
In another an irrational attachment to a particular 
printed book. In another successive conceptions : 
first that the human reason was sufficient for the 
whole foundations of human life — that there were 
no mysteries : next, the opposite extravagance that 
the human reason had no final authority even in its 
own sphere. And these two, though contradictory, 
had one root. The rationalism of the eighteenth 
century carried on through the materialism of the 
nineteenth, the irrational doubts of Kant (which 
included much emotional rubbish) carried on to 
the sheer chaos of the later metaphysicians, with 
their denial of contradictions, and even of being, 
each sprang from this necessity of the unsupported 
soul to make itself some system from within : as 
the unsupported soul in an evil dream now stifles 
in strict confinement and is next dissolved in 
some fearful emptiness. 

All this, the first interior effect of the Reforma- 
tion, strong in proportion to the strength of the 
reforming movement, powerful in the regions or 
sects which had broken away, far less powerful in 
those which had maintained the Faith, would seem 
to have run its full course, and to have settled 
at last into universal negation and a universal 
challenge proffered to every institution and every 
postulate. But since humanity cannot repose in 
such a stage of anarchy, we may well believe that 



324 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

there is coming, or has already begun, yet another 
stage, in which the lack of corporate support for 
the soul will breed attempted strange religions ; 
witchcrafts and necromancies. 

It may be so. It may be that the great debate 
will come up for final settlement before such novel 
diseases spread far. At any rate, for the moment, 
we are clearly in a stage of complete negation. 
But it is to be repeated that this breaking up of 
the foundations differs in degree with varying 
societies, that still in a great mass of Europe, 
numerically the half perhaps, the necessary anchors 
of sanity still hold ; and that half is the half 
where directly by the practice of the Faith, or 
indirectly through a hold upon some part of its 
tradition, the Catholic Church exercises an admitted 
or distant authority over the minds of men. 

The next process we note is — by what some 
may think a paradox — also due to the isolation of 
the soul. It is the process of increasing knowledge. 
Men acting in a fashion highly corporate will 
not so readily question, nor therefore so readily 
examine, as will men acting alone. Men whose 
major results are taken upon an accepted 
philosophy will not be driven by such a need of 
enquiry as those who have abandoned that guide- 
In the moment, more than a thousand years ago, 
when the last of the evangelising flood-tide was 
still running strongly, a very great man wrote of 



CONCLUSION 325 

the physical sciences: "Upon such toys I wasted my 
youth." And another wrote, speaking of divine 
knowledge : " All the rest is smoke." 

But in the absence of faith, demonstrable things 
are the sole consolation. 

There are three forms in which the human mind 
can hold a truth : The form of Science, which 
means that we accept a thing through demonstra- 
tion, and therefore cannot admit the possibility of 
its opposite. The form of Opinion, which means 
that we accept a thing through probability, that is 
through a partial, but not complete demonstration, 
and therefore we do not deny the possibility of the 
opposite. The form of Faith, where we accept 
the thing without demonstration and yet deny 
the possibility of its opposite ; as, for instance, the 
faith of all men not mad in the existence of the 
universe about them, and of other human minds. 

When acknowledged and defined faith departs, 
it is clear that of the remaining two rivals, 
Opinion has no ground against Science. That 
which can be demonstrated holds all the field. 
Indeed it is the mark of modern insufficiency that 
it can conceive of no other form of certitude save 
certitude through demonstration, and therefore 
does not, as a rule, recognise even its own 
unproved first principles. 

Well, this function of the isolated soul, enquiry, 
and the necessity for demonstration, for individual 



326 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

conviction through measurement and physical 
fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the 
three modern centuries. We all are equally 
familiar with its prodigious results. Not one of 
them has, as yet, added to human happiness : not 
one but has been increasingly misused to the 
misery of man. There is in the tragedy something 
comic also, which is the perpetual puzzlement of 
these, the very authors of discovery, to find that 
somehow or other discovery alone does not create 
joy, and that somehow or other, a great knowledge 
can be used ill, as anything else can be used ill. 
Also in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet 
further extension of physical science as promising, 
in some illogical way, relief. 

A progression in physical science and in the use 
of instruments is so natural to man (so long as 
civic order is preserved) that it would indeed have 
taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the 
unity of Europe been preserved. But the destruc- 
tion of that unity fatally accelerated the pace and 
as fatally threw the movement off its rails. 

The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European 
thing, was much older than the Reformation, 
which was its perversion and corruption. The 
doors upon modern knowledge had been opened 
before the soul which was to enter them had been 
cut off from its fellows. We owe the miscarriage 
of all our great endeavour in this field, not to that 



CONCLUSION 327 

spring of endeavour, but to its deflection. It is 
a blasphemy to deny the value of advancing 
knowledge, and at once a cowardice and a folly to 
fear it for its supposed consequences. Its con- 
sequences are only evil through an evil use, that 
is, through an evil philosophy. 

In connection with this release of powerful 
enquiry through the isolation of the soul, you 
have an apparently contradictory, and certainly 
supplementary, effect ; the setting up of unfounded 
external authority. It is a curious development, 
one very little recognised, but one which a fixed 
observance of the modern world will immediately 
reveal ; and those who come to see it are invariably 
astonished at the magnitude of its action. Men — 
under the very influence of scepticism — have come 
to accept, almost any printed matter, almost any 
repeated name, as an authority infallible and to be 
admitted without question. They have come to 
regard the denial of such authority as a sort of 
insanity, or rather they have in most practical 
affairs come to be divided into two groups : a small 
number of men who know the truth, say, upon a 
political matter or some financial arrangement, or 
some unsolved problem ; and a vast majority which 
accepts without question, an always incomplete, a 
usually quite false, statement of the thing, be- 
cause it has been repeated in the daily press and 
vulgarised in a hundred books. 



328 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

This singular and fantastic result of the long 
divorce between the non-Catholic mind and reason 
has a profound effect upon the modern world. 
Indeed the great battle about to be engaged 
between chaos and order will turn largely upon 
this form of suggestion, this acceptation of an 
unfounded and irrational authority. 

Lastly, there is, of the major consequences of 
the Reformation, that phenomenon which we 
have come to call " Capitalism," and which many, 
recognising its universal evil, wrongly regard as 
the prime obstacle to a right settlement of human 
society, and to the solution of our now intolerable 
modern strains. 

What is called "Capitalism" arose directly in 
all its branches from the isolation of the soul. 
That isolation permitted an unrestricted competi- 
tion. It gave to superior cunning and even to 
superior talent an unchecked career. It gave 
every license to greed. And on the other side it 
broke down the corporate bonds whereby men 
maintain themselves in an economic stability. 
Through it there arose in England first, later 
throughout the more active Protestant nations, 
and later still in various decrees throughout the 
rest of Christendom, a system under which a few 
possessed the land and the machinery of produc- 
tion, and the many were gradually dispossessed. 
The many thus dispossessed could only exist upon 



CONCLUSION 329 

doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human 
life a care to these. The possessors also mastered 
the State and all its organs — hence the great 
National Debts which accompanied the system: 
hence even the financial hold of distant and alien 
men upon subject provinces of economic effort : 
hence the draining of wealth, not only from 
increasingly dissatisfied subjects overseas, but 
from the individual producers of foreign indepen- 
dent states. 

The true conception of property disappears 
under such an arrangement, and you naturally get 
a demand for relief through the denial of the 
principle of ownership altogether. Here again, as 
in the matter of the irrational tabus and of 
scepticism, two apparently contradictory things 
have one root : Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman 
system (not realisable) called Socialism, both 
spring from one type of mind, and both apply to 
one kind of diseased society. 

Against both the pillar of reaction is peasant 
society ; and peasant society has proved through- 
out Europe largely co-ordinate with the remaining 
authority of the Catholic Church. For a peasant 
society does not mean a society composed of peasants, 
but one in which modern Industrial Capitalism 
yields to agriculture, and in which agriculture is in 
the main conducted by men possessed in part or 
altogether of their instruments of production and 



330 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

of the soil, either through complete ownership or 
customary tenure. In such a society all the 
institutions of the state repose upon an underlying 
conception of secure and well -divided private 
property which can never be questioned, and which 
colours all men's minds. And that doctrine, like 
every other sane doctrine, though applicable only 
to temporal conditions, has the firm support of the 
Catholic Church. 

So things have gone. "We have reached at 
last, as the final result of that catastrophe three 
hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot 
endure, and a dissolution of standards, a melting of 
the spiritual framework, such that the body politic 
fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to 
continue down this endless and ever -darkening 
road is like the piling up of debt. We go further 
and further from a settlement. Our various forms 
of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, 
the very principle of life, loses its meaning ; and 
this awful edifice of civilisation which we have 
inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles, 
and threatens to crash down. It is clearly 
insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who 
still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it 
comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing. 

In such a crux there remains the historical 
truth : that this our European structure, built 



CONCLUSION 331 

upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, 
was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, 
and will stand only in the mould of, the Catholic 
Church. 

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will 
perish. 

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith. 



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